What Are Meta Tags and How Do I configure Mine to Get The Best Traffic for my site

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp
That should help. If you got any further questions after reading that, you can ask.

as a rule of thumbs, your meta keyword tags should not be more than 150 xters, and avoid keyword stuffing, not SEO friendly

Off the top of my head:

Meta tags are descriptive terms that allow search engine crawlers understand what a page is about. Search engines store these descriptive terms against that page and compare them to search strings. That is how your page comes up when someone searches on Google or Bing etc. Several sites compete on who has produced the best write up within a tag "categorisation". That is why they say one site ranks higher on certain terms. That is why one site appears on page 1 of a google search while another is on page 2.

Take for example, you are writting a page about Nollywood movies. You would be expected to use "nollywood movies"  or other descriptive terms people may likely use to seach for and locate information about Nigerian movies (nollywood movies) as your meta tags. Depending on how well you have written your piece and how many times you have repeated the tags within the writeup, search egines will rank you. A lot many people abuse this feature. They find currently popular issues. Create bogus pages of something entirely different and insert the tags for the popular news items. This will attract a lot of "hits" but the search engines punish them in the end.

Avoid what the first poster said too. "Meta tags stuffing" - unnecessarily repeating a term within your page to attract more hits. Search engines use intricate algorithms that expose cheaters. People are constantly devising ways of ranking higher on search engines but the likes of Google and co are very smart too. No one really knows how they rank websites. Its a closely guarded secret.

Most CMS, would automatically generate meta tags for you so you dont have to worry. Otherwise you can install plugins that will allow you enter your own tags. Most blogging software like Wordpress handle everyhting for you.

Studying about and improving your meta tags fall under what is called SEO (Search engine optimisation). Its a very vast, dynamic art and you can find loads of resources on the internet about it. Check this site SEObook. They are good.

Depending on whichh CMS you are using, there are lots of SEO plugins that will help you improve your search ranking. One important one you should install immediately is xml sitemap plugin. All the cms have that plugin.