Based on the principle of surface plasmon slow optical waveguide, a metamaterial absorber with high absorption efficiency in the whole near infrared band is designed by using dielectric silicon (dielectric layer) and Au (metal layer). The simulation results show that the bandwidth of the absorber is the largest when the thicknesses of the metal layer and the dielectric layer are 0.04 μm and 0.02 μm, respectively. It is also found that the width of the waveguide layer and the number of absorber layers have great influence on the absorption bandwidth. Finally, it is calculated that the absorption efficiency of the metamaterial absorber can be maintained over 90% in the whole near infrared band when the incident angle of light is below 40° under TM polarization. Moreover, the absorption efficiency for TE and TM polarizations is equal at normal incidence, which shows that the metamaterial absorber designed in this paper is polarization independent.