a bunch of upvotes come almost together like automated upvoting...

They are automated. Called curation trails. You can attach a percentage of your vote to a curator who's doing this regularly, or a curator community (not like the communities function, rather a real community almost always their own Discord server and roles). That's useful for people who are not around to manually curate but don't want to waste their Hive Power since you can have your 10 full votes per day, they recharge and they do bring you a portion of the rewards that's tied to your hive power. So some people who invested a lot of capital, let's say a million Hive Power for example, can then go on a holiday and still get their cut daily. Some people want to maximize curation rewards ad trust the optimized voting of pro curators to do that. These are two of the reasons. Some would just like to support a certain community and give their voting power to somebody who regularly does that.

Also, some people can automate voting for other chosen accounts every time they post. So, being here for a while, I have some list of auto votes going on...but that can depend on various filters, such as tags.

I was wondering how important are these tags

The use of some tags gives you a chance to be discovered by curators within that tag. Either manually, or triggered by some automated algorithm.

Also, people around here dislike too frequent use of their tags, say more than a couple of times a day, because that seems like milking their curation pool to them. And sometimes it is. So, don't be hasty and be patient with sharing your content. Engaging on the content of others is a nice way to have take a break and still be present here. It pays off long-term because your social connections are still one of the main factors of where you are in the end.