In this section, we will cover how to optimize your product pages by entering meta information.
The word meta means "About this subject". Webmasters use meta tags to tell search engines about a page. A page's meta information should accurately describe the content and purpose of that page. This helps the search engines categorize the page better. Some search engines use meta keywords and meta descriptions, while others ignore them. Because search engines can change their policies at any time, it is to your advantage to add this meta information, just in case your favorite search engine begins using it.
I use the word "page" instead of "site" deliberately. While you may be concerned about the search engine rank of your store's website, search engines do not index sites; they index pages. Therefore, it is important that you try to optimize each page of your store for search engines.
Many store owners are concerned about the search rank of their store's home page. While I do not suggest that you ignore the front page, you should also optimize each product's page. When people search for a specific type of online store, you want your store's front page to rank high in the results. When they search for a specific product, you want at least one of your products to rank high. We will cover optimizing your product pages in another section.
There are three prerequisites for this technique:
You need access to the administrative interface and must be able to edit product information.
You must spend time thinking about, and if possible, researching the search terms that your customers will use to find a product.
You must spend time thinking about, and if possible, researching what your customers want to see in the search results.
4. Select the Meta Information tab:
6. In the Meta Keywords field, enter the search terms and/or phrases that your customers are most likely to use.
7. In the Meta Description field, enter a description that you would like potential customers to see in their search results.
8. Click on the Save button.
Let's look at how meta information works on a web page.
Here is a product page from our demonstration site:
If you view the HTML code for this page, you will see meta information in several places. You can do this yourself, by selecting View | Page Source from your browser's menu.
Near the top of the page, we find the page title which is the first piece of meta information. We also find some meta information that describes the page. We are talking about the title, meta description, and meta keyword tags:
<head> <title>Blue Mountain Triage--Whole Bean</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <meta name="description" content="The world's most famous coffee, and for good reason. There are many imitators and blends, but ours is certified as genuine. Grown only in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, between 3,000 and 7,500 feet altitude. Rich, chocolatey,. low in acid and high in flavor." /> <meta name="keywords" content="Blue Mountain Triage Whole Bean coffee" />
Search engines use the title and meta tags to categorize a page and to match a person's search terms to your page. No one, except the engineers who create the search engines, knows how much weight is given to each of these elements. However, there is much evidence that meta information plays a part in matching a page to a person's search query. That is why we will carefully construct this meta information for each product page.
Note
Most SEO experts agree that Google no longer uses the meta keywords tag when ranking search results. However, they do not penalize you for having it, so there's no harm in using it. As of this writing, Yahoo! recommends using it (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html), and it is still used by some other search engines like AOL.
The title for our example page is Blue Mountain Triage--Whole Bean. If someone uses the words in the title in a search, or even better, uses the exact phrase, then the example page should be listed among the results.
In the following screenshot, you can see a very optimistic example. The user has entered the exact search term that we have in our title, and our example page is the first result:
So before you write your title and your meta keywords, spend time thinking about this question:
Note
What search terms and phrases are most likely to be used by the people who are most likely to buy this product?
The answer is your meta keywords.
Let's take another look at the meta description for this product page:
<meta name="description" content="The world's most famous coffee, and for good reason. There are many imitators and blends, but ours is certified as genuine. Grown only in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, between 3,000 and 7,500 feet altitude. Rich, chocolatey,. low in acid and high in flavor." />
Now, look at the first search result. Sometimes, search engines display the meta description for a page. This means that the person searching will use the meta description to decide whether to visit the page. So before you write your meta description, spend time thinking about this question:
Note
For the people who are most likely to buy this product, what description will most likely inspire them to visit the product page?
There is much evidence that a page's title has a large effect upon how a search engine categorizes a page, and matches search terms to a page. However, if you stuff a page title with too many keywords, it can become unreadable. So you must also consider this question:
In the previous section, we presented several questions that must be answered before adding meta information to your product page. Choosing the best meta information can help customers find your product. How to choose this meta information is the subject of entire books.
Here are some tips for writing meta information:
Don't repeat the same keywords over again because search engines will treat this as spam.
If your title, meta keywords, or meta description tag contains repeated keywords, it might be ignored.
Search engines use a technique called "word stemming". If the person who is searching is looking for a word that is part of one of your keywords, then the search engine will match them. For example, if someone is searching for a "fridge" and one of your keywords is "refrigerator", then the search engine finds that match. So, include the longest form of each search term in your title or meta information.
Try to include the keywords that are in your title and meta information in the body of your page. In Magento, that means repeating the keywords in the Product Description field. We showed you how to do that in the previous sectionHow to do it....
If you're interested in learning more about optimizing keywords, descriptions, and titles, then see some of the resources in the following sectionThere's more...
Because Google has the largest share of the search market, many webmasters are concerned about how their sites rank in Google searches. For advice about optimizing your pages for Google, you can go to Google's help pages.
This is Google's help page about page titles and descriptions. It gives advice on writing good page titles and descriptions.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624