Agreed, they have been, keywords is generally a low cost one to put in place, which often helps with ones for other searches. Some of the smaller players you'll see more long tail benefits from. The other meta tags such as description are more relevant to those still tough.
Though also, many early stage bootstrapping products, at least here in the valley don't consider SEO within marketing. A key take away I'd suggest is that they absolutely should. This is all of course after building a kick ass product.
link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-do...