Ranking high in search engines is like a carefully balanced high-wire act:
you can't tip too far to either side or you will not reach your goal. When
creating a website, you must use both content and meta tags effectively, but
not excessively. There are four main elements that you must harmonize: Meta
Tags, Description, Title and Content.

Wouldn't it be great if we could simply edit Meta tags and get high rankings?

Buying text links. It's all the rage.
Is it evil? Is it good? Will it help your search engine rankings? Will it get you banned? Will it increase your PageRank? Will it increase your link popularity? Will it bring targeted traffic to your site? Should you do it? Should you hire a broker to do it?

Targeting keywords is a specialized aspect of e-Marketing where web site content is written so that it is recognized by search engines as being an important destination for search engine users who use the targeting keywords or phrases being addressed.  Put another way...if you want your web site to be highly placed when a search engine user types in the phrase "chocolate cake", then you write your website content so that it contains lots of information in the appropriate places and ways so that the website finds your website to be one of the top 10 places for information on that subject.