Using the Meta Data fields for SEO

Using the Meta Data fields for SEO

What is Meta Data?

Meta data is additional information that a site owner can provide to search engines and users, to increase the understanding of the contents of a page. For SEO reasons you will often have Meta Title, Meta Description, Keywords and the Page Title itself, though more meta data can be added (see the Moz.com breakdown)

Where is the Shopit Meta Data?

Shopit gives you the ability to add/edit the meta data fields at the bottom of  every:
  1. Page
  2. Blog post
  3. Category page
  4. Product page




Editing the Meta Data

Firstly, we recommend that you take advice from an SEO expert, or read one of the many blogs on the topic including: Moz, SearchEngineWatch, Advanced Web Ranking,  and even Google and Bing themselves.

Overall, you should make your meta data succinct and an accurate representation of what is on the page. Here our example does 2 things:
  1. A simple explanation of what the product is, and additional features like the D rings and materials.
  2. We have also chosen to target school search terms in our product title and description, and also included an more persuasive but factual delivery message. This plays well with our recommended Multi Site Strategy.



Search Engine Guidelines

For each meta data section, there are search engine specific limitations and guidelines.

Lengths

For example; depending on character widths, Google will read the entire meta data but only display:
  1. The first 50-60 characters of a Meta Title
  2. The first 150-160 characters of a Meta Description
  3. Your entire url string (www.site.com/category/product/13...) unless they decide to truncate it (Site > > Product)
This data can vary for mobile versus desktop devices.

Unique Information

To avoid cannibalisation (where 2 of your pages compete for the same keyword search result), you should always create unique meta data. 

eCommerce sites naturally lend themselves well to unique data, but site owners should be careful where products are similar, and where categories are similar. Content pages and blogs should also be reviewed carefully for different content and meta data.

Screaming Frog is an excellent piece of software to help you view, analyse and correct masses of ecommerce meta data.

There is no guarantee from the search engines that they will display your exactly inputed data

Recommendations on Improving Clickthroughs


A key recommendation on creating your meta data - as well as the search engines indexing and understanding you - is the persuasion value to encourage clickthroughs.

There is no perfect science to this (it's often trial and error) but consider the big differences in the following example:



Meta Titles

  1. Garden Furniture Centre offer a simple 'great prices' message
  2. Wayfair are more emotive
  3. Dunelm are descriptive in the types they sell

Meta Descriptions

  1. Garden Furniture Centre show off the amount of items available and their delivery options
  2. Wayfair talk about styles and budget, and are more colloquial in saying 'big stuff'
  3. Dunelm generically mention ranges, then hone in on the specific Nevada and Helsinki ranges

What goes in these fields is ultimately your choice - though do wear both a technical and a marketing head when you do so. 

You can export/import your sales channel specific information to make mass changes.


And remember that search engines do not guarantee they will publish your exact information: https://www.perrill.com/google-change-title-description-search-results/


    • Related Articles

    • Adding Google Analytics code

      Google Analytics is one of many analytics services available for site owners to review and monitor their site activity. Examples of information you can learn include: Number of site visitors Most (and least) popular pages Traffic Sources (e.g. ...

    • Finding and submitting your sitemap

      All Shopit sales channels will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains links to all your products, product images, pages, and blog posts. This can be found at www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml The sitemap is used by search engines like ...

    • Automatic and Manual Redirects

      Automatic URL Redirects When changing a category name, the browser will always look at the URL handle. It's good SEO practice to change the url handle to match the new Category Title.  Changing the url handle from A to B, will also create an ...

    • Making Your Site Live - Domains

      When launching a website by changing DNS settings, it can take 0-48 hours for a site to go live. Your website will still be accessible to you via the 'Edit Website' link within Design, or using the previous development url e.g. ...

    • Understanding Shopit's default cache

      Shopit has a default cache setup for every website which - depending on the changes you make and the server connection locations - can mean you don't see web changes for 10 seconds to 10minutes Why do you have a cache? All website visitors demand a ...