When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) there are three important META Tags you need to include within your site's pages. They are the Title Tag, Description Tag and Keyword Tag. Good news... Shopsite supports them ALL!

If you are a little rusty with your Search Engine jargon, here's a primer. There are three types of meta-tags that concern most web owners:

Title Tag - This is the text that appears in the 'title bar' of the web browser. It is also used as the clickable link for your site's listing within the Search Engine results.

Description Tag - This is the area where you are supposed to sum up what the page is about. This content is used for the page description within the Search Engine Results found.

Keyword Tag - This section is used for letting the search engines know what words / phrases are important within the page.

Step #1: Logging into Shopsite

Before you can start working with your page's META Tags within Shopsite you have to first be logged into its web based interface. Depending on your hosting provider you will have been given access information in order to login. If you do NOT have this information, get it from you host.



Once you have logged into your Shopsite back office you will be presented with a screen just like the one displayed above.

Step #2: Accessing the Page to Add META Data To

Click on the Pages button.



Select the page and click the Edit Page Content button.



Scroll till you reach the Advanced Info section and see the Meta Keywords and Meta Description fields.



Step #3: Setting Up Your Page's META Description

Enter the text you wish to appear in your page's META Description in the Meta Description field.



Sidebar: Tips on Creating a META Description Tag

Keep in mind that your DESCRIPTION needs to be enticing for humans to click on. If they are not interested in what they see then what good is having #1 placement?

As a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of your Meta Description tag in the site description it displays in its results. MSN uses the first 15 or so words.

It is recommended that you write out a 30-word description of each page of your website that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words need to get across what the page is about - this is all the MSN searchers will see. The second set of 15 words should support the first set of words because it will be included in the Yahoo search results.

Google results will sometimes only show the first 7 - 15 words although you can never count on it.

Step #4: Setting Up Your Page's Keyword Tag

Enter your page's Meta Keywords into the Shopsite Meta Keyword section of your page.



Sidebar: Tips on Creating a META Keyword Tag

A good rule of thumb when creating your page's META Keyword tag is to include the words and phrases that are important to you for the page you are working on. Once you have identified the words / phrases you will need to separate them up with a space and comma.

An example would be:

test, phrase, test phrase

Step #5: Setting up Your Page's Title Tag

At this point and time Shopsite does not have a 'page' field for the META Title tag. Since this tag is responsible for 60% of your page's search engine score we recommend that you use either your Page's Name or Custom Page Field (Shopsite Pro Only).



Step #6: Saving Your Changes

Once you have finished updating your page's META Tag information click on the Save Changes button.



This concludes our tutorial on how to add META Tags into your Shopsite pages.