75% of businesses are not found on the major search engines for their relevant keywords/ phrases!
With billions of documents online, potential customers are unlikely to visit your Website unless they know it's location or they can find it easily. The simple fact is that search engines are increasingly finding that they cannot cope. They are excellent if you are looking for a particular company or news topic but general topic searches will return thousands of entries most of which are directories.
Directories are the best to start your search if you are looking for general information. Because a human being has reviewed each site it is considered by most people (and most search engine spiders) to be more likely to be relevant to their enquiry than other sites. Directories do not depend on any Meta tags but are purely judged on the unique content of your site. However, you only usually get 1 entry in a directory so getting it right the first time is very important!