When developing your ecommerce website, you need everything to be as perfect as possible. This includes the look of the site, the navigation, the description of the products, and the quality and convenience your ecommerce shopping cart. However, one of the areas where many people who are developing these sites tend to forget is the meta tags.
While the keyword tags might not have as much importance as they once did, they are still important parts of the page, and sellers really do need to pay attention to them and make sure they are properly optimized for the best results. They title and description tags are still highly important. You should always do everything you can to get the most from every aspect of your site.
What Are the Meta Tags?
The meta tags are something of a summary for the page, and they generally include the specific keywords for each page. The most important of the meta tags are the title and description tags, as the search engines will capture these and display them in the search engines. They should include the most important keywords for the page. With ecommerce pages, the keywords on the page will likely be very specific to the product or category page.
Because many ecommerce websites have a number of different categories and even more products, adding the meta tags can take quite a bit of time, which leads some sellers to neglect to add the tags, which is a mistake. It might take time and effort, but it is worth it. Sellers can always hire outside help to assist them with optimizing their meta tags as well.
Optimization Tips
As mentioned, the title and meta tags need to have relevant keywords in them for the page they are on. It is important to remember that the search engine robots that scour the web read from left to right, so sellers will always want to add the most important keywords first on the page. Using tools to analyze meta tag data can help you understand what you are doing right and wrong with tags so you can make changes.
When you are working on your ecommerce pages, you want people to know exactly what product is on each page, and the title tag is the best way to do that. The title tag should indicate exactly what the product is. Title tags should be between 10 and 60 characters for the best results, so that everything fits nicely on the search engine results page.
The description tag can be longer – up to 200 characters. Keeping it a bit shorter ensures that it will all show up in the results pages. Once again, keywords are important here. You want to make sure the main keyword of the page is in the first part of the description. The closer to the front the better. Make sure it matches the title tag as well. The less important keywords can come later in the text. Never stuff keywords into a description, or any type of content for that matter, as it always looks and sounds ridiculous to readers. The search engines are aware of what you are doing as well, and they may punish your site for keyword stuffing.
Summary:
Ecommerce website owners need to add meta tags to all of their product pages to get the best results. Many site owners feel that taking the time to work on the site’s meta data is not worthwhile, but that is simply not true. Sites of all sorts need to have good meta tags to help them rank well in the search engines. Sites with a large number of products on them will find it even more important, as sellers want to have each of the product pages ranking as highly as possible in the results pages.
Resource: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/sem/meta_tag_optimization.htm