Metatags in the Search module

[mtel]

I've inherited command of a CMSMS intranet site running Search 1.6.10 and one of the issues with the site I've been asked to fix is the poor internal searchability of it. The most obvious way, to me, to do this was to use the metatag keywords to better reflect page content especially where people have used images as links. In doing some testing though it appears that the Search module only indexes the plain-text content of the site - I don't get any hits for metatag-specific words or img alt/title text.

Is the Search module capable of this or is there another way to achieve the same result?

The previous maintainer has put large dumps of background-coloured plain-text at the bottom of some pages but it's kind of an ugly workaround and I'm hoping I'm just overlooking something simple.