SEO is both important and often misunderstood. There's probably as much misinformation on the Internet about SEO as there is good, solid advice.

While we don't have the opportunity or space to go into great detail about SEO in this book, we can help you establish good practices that can reap great rewards in terms of increasing your search engine visibility and helping online shoppers know what you're offering.

Meta fields are bits of data that are stored in the HTML code of a web page. Customers can't see this code as it's not displayed by the browser. However, search engines can see this data (in fact, they can see everything "under the hood"). Google, Bing, and others use this metadata in conjunction with many other analyzed items on your page to determine how to present your site to search users, including the rank and content.