Meta tags are bits of HTML code that are generally placed near the beginning of webpages. In the early day of the Internet, one could simply put their keywords in their meta tags and shoot straight to top rankings. But that was long ago and search engines don't weight meta tags as much as they once did. In fact, there's some speculation amongst SEO experts that meta tags don't affect rankings at all anymore.

Even if meta tags don't affect rankings, there is still one type of meta tag that can be important, and that's the meta description tag. The reason this tag can be important is because the content of this tag shows up on the search results pages in search engines like Google and is therefore visible to human beings. If that content is well-crafted it may influence someone to click on your link and therefore increase the amount of traffic driven to your website.

If the meta description tag is left blank then Google will replace it with text from that webpage, which sometimes is just as well, but not always, and therefore it pays to pay attention to what is showing up in the search results pages and include meta description tags if appropriate.

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