Does effective is meta tagging?

Yes,there is a correlation between website desgin and site-traffic.But the design means the design of the structure of a well-formed HTML code.Like h1,h2..and meta tags.But it's easy to abuse to be used by some webmasters.So don't do too much about SEO about this.Just add more good content to your website.

I honestly believe meta tags are still important when it comes to website design. The reason is that when I am doing SEO for my sites I often change the meta tags on certain pages and notice a direct correlation between my position in the search engine for specific terms when I do these changes. Yes there are other factors that will contribute to this change but still believe that they do have some effect on where your site will appear, just not as much as they use to. What is essential is to have a well thought out site which search engines can spider easily and that you optimize your pages using the likes of appropriate keywords in header tags to give you a decent chance of competing in the search engine listings.