HTML tags located in the <head> of a document that convey page metadata. Meta data is “data about data” – in this case data about the page.
The most commonly used meta tag attributes are keywords and description. Below is a sample of a description meta tag:
<meta name="description" content="Your concise and incisive description of the page goes here." >
Since information stored in meta tags can be exploited by including terms not relevant to the page, search engines have not used meta data for ranking purposes for several years. However, a page’s meta description may still be displayed by search engines in their results pages. There is no valid SEO purpose for using the keyword meta tag.