Aldridge Solutions

Helping Your Work Flow

Meta data is, as you probably know, information embedded within your website pages that search engines look at as part of the process of evaluating the relevance of your pages to a searcher's particular keyword or phrase. It is not the be-all and end-all of search engine optimisation that it was at the dawn of the world-wide web, but still plays an important role in a well rounded search engine optimised site.

B2CPrintShop has three different areas to consider when customising your Page Titles, Descriptions and Keyword lists.

Default B2C Meta Data

B2CPrintShop will by default use the Page Title, Description and Keywords data set in your control panel > Content Manager tab for all pages that do not have their own overrides for these set.

  • Set a meaning full, accurate title that applies to the entire website.
  • Write a short (about 50-100 words) general description of the website, mention a few key products but don't just list everything.
  • Provide a list (separated by commas ",") of relevant keywords or phrases for your entire site, here you can list all products but don't go over about 30-40 words or phrases. (I deliberately mention phrases here, not just words as these days keywords can contain multiple words, for example "design a business card" can be a single "keyword")

These will now be used as the defaults on all pages of your site where individual overrides have not been set, as well as on your home page.

Search engines prefer pages not to have exact duplicate information in these fields, within reason, so if you want to present the best site possible for search engine ranking you should continue and set very specific Title, Description and Keyword meta data on all static and product pages on your site.

Static Pages

Still in your Content Manager control panel, select each of your static website pages (for example About Us, Contact Us etc.) from the drop-down list "edit text page" and you will see at the top, above the editor, three boxes in a row, Title, Description, Keywords.

  • Set for each static page published on your website accurate, unique and relatively short titles, descriptions and keywords and phrases (individual words and phrases being separated by commas as above).

Product Pages

Each individual product description page can also have it's own meta data. On your control panel go to the Initial Settings tab. Click the "Edit Graphic Engines Data" link. For each of your product groups you will see below the short description a link "Click here to edit this module's preview text page". Click this link and as above you will find the three boxes for our meta data at the top of each page.

  • For each product description page published on your site set accurate, unique, short titles, descriptions and keyword lists.

For additional search engine bonus points make sure the contents of each page uses the same words used in the description and keywords fields as many times as possible while still reading as good English and providing accurate information to your website visitors, but make sure you never "keyword stuff"! This is the practise of putting every possible word anyone might search on in a long list either in the contents themselves or in any of the meta data fields. It will only do harm to your search engine rankings.

Good luck with your meta data updates, it's something that takes a bit of time, but once done will pay dividends in the long run.

 

 

 

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