Meta tags do not affect the appearance of a website and are not visible when you look at a Web page, but they provide information regarding the content of the site. For example, the keyword meta tag for a website offering handmade watches and related items may appear as follows:
And the description meta tag (which also appears in many search engines' results pages) may look like:
Meta tags are used primarily by search engines that wade through the HTML code and text of each page. When a search engine finds a search term in a meta tag, it indexes the Web page for display in its search results. Over the past few years, because websites manipulated their keywords so much, keyword meta tags decreased in importance in search algorithms. In fact, Google ignores keyword meta tags altogether, although it still relies somewhat on description meta tags
