Setting Product Meta Tags

As a business owner, one of the fundamentals questions you must always ask is, “Will this help increase sales?” This is an important question to ask yourself when you’re building your online store. Let’s talk about how writing Meta Information for your products will positively impact your bottom line.

To set product meta tags:

1. In the Admin panel, select Catalog > Manage Products.
2. Select a product to edit by clicking Edit on its respective row.
3. Select Meta Information tab from the left panel to display the following window.

4. Enter content in the following fields:
   • Meta Title – This is used to give each product page a unique title. This title can be seen at the top bar of a web browser. It is also used as the title on a search engine results page (SERP).
   • Meta Keywords – Meta keywords are words and phrases relevant to the product or page. In 2009, Google officially announced that it will not use meta keywords in page ranking (see more here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html).
   • Meta Description – The meta description is a short description of the page or product. This description is sometimes used by search engines in the little snippet used on a SERP.

Meta information is essentially your first level of contact with potential customers that are searching for relevant key words. Your title and description is a selling tool that will either motivate a user to click your link or not. It is wise to use a descriptive title and a description that includes relevant words that a potential customer might search.

Meta information will not be visible to visitors of your page, but it will be read by search engine spiders (or bots). In your product page’s HTML code it will look something like this to the search engine:

Although Google has officially announced that it does not recognize meta keywords, this doesn’t mean other search engines don’t. In the past, key words were used to manipulate search engine results and, therefore, lost their ranking value among major search engines. Be sure to write a meta title and description for products you add to your online store. Meta keywords should be given the lowest priority.