SEO: January 2007 Archives

Many times, when first starting a design for a ProStores e-commerce site, people are confused by the META tags in the header template (used by default on all pages). Here is a quick, easy way to enjoy relatively good META tag performance on all your pages with one set of SSML template tags.

There are three main META tags that any store should have (you’re on your own for others), Title, Description and Keywords. First, do your homework - make sure you write these well with appropriate use of keywords and keyword phrases. Keep in mind, the earlier a keyword or phrase appears in the value the more important it becomes. Now, lets look at the template tags.

Title

<ss:value source="$page.title"/>

This tag will dynamically assign a title meta tag to each page in your ProStores design that uses the default header. On content pages like About Us, it will use the store name and the page name (Our Online Store: About US) - generally, this works fine but may need tweaking later. On catalog pages (category list and detail pages) the name of the category or product will dynamically appear (Our Online Store: Category One). This makes the category and product names paramount in importance.

Description

<meta name="Description" content="$page.meta.description">

This tag will dynamically assign a description tag to each page in your ProStores design that uses the default header. Content pages do not have a description in the database, so a default should be used. For catalog pages, the category or product description is used automatically - make sure to enter that data in your store. You must not use HTML in those descriptions - HTML in META tags is baaaadd.

Keywords

<meta name="Keywords" content="$page.meta.keywords">

This tag will dynamically assign keyword tag to each page in your ProStores design that uses the default header. Again, content pages do not have keywords - default set is used. Unfortunately, categories do not have database keywords either - we recommend customizing to the hilt to fix this, but the defaults can be set easily. The product keywords are generated by the ProStores system automagically - based on the category name, product name, OEM, and SKU. Using this approach, your product detail pages are perfectly optimized every time. We all want our detail pages found with a search, that is where sales happen after all.

Code Samples

Here is an example of standard META code you may find in a default template set in ProStores. This basic set of META will work great for all your product detail pages - which are the most important - but will not really address any other pages very gracefully.

<ss:value source="$page.title"/>
<meta name="Description" content="$page.meta.description">
<meta name="Keywords" content="$page.meta.keywords">

Here is an example snippet of code that will test for the availability of these elements and use a default if not available. This allows you to specify your own set of keywords and descriptions when they may not be provided by the database of products.

<ss:if test="$page.bodyTemplate.name == 'storefront'">
	<title>Set Your StoreFront Title by <ss:value source="$store.name"/></title>
<ss:else/>
	<ss:value source="$page.title"/>
</ss:if>

<ss:if test="$page.hasMetaDescription">
	<meta name="Description" content="$page.meta.description">
<ss:else/>
	<meta name="Description" content="Set your own description">
</ss:if>

<ss:if test="$page.hasMetaKeywords">
	<meta name="Keywords" content="$page.meta.keywords">
<ss:else/>
	<meta name="Keywords" content="set,your,own,keywords">
</ss:if>