Avactis Shopping Cart: Promote Your Website on the Internet. Part 2: Meta tags.

If you open the source on the “index” page of your store, you will see several lines that look like these:

<title>Avactis Demo Store</title>

The code might look exactly as shown above if you have not yet made any changes. Similar code is used for each page of your store. These are the tags that give search engines information about your store.

Avactis allows you to easily edit the information provided in these tags. For example, to make changes for the “index” page, simply go to the “Manage Categories” section in your administration panel and edit the “Home” category. Expand the Search Engine Information section and you will see the fields where you can type your text.

You should fill in these fields for each category, each product, and each cms article in your store.

Let's discuss each tag separately.

The first tag in the example is <title> . This is not a meta tag, but it is one of the most useful and important tags on every page. Each search engine uses it to gather information about the page. In practice, the text typed in this tag is displayed at the very top of the Internet browser’s window. It is usually what is displayed as the link name in search engine results. That is why it is very important to create a page title that closely describes the page content.

What should be typed in Page Title?

Each page title must be unique and contain keywords. Don’t insert them more than 3 times. It is better to place them at the beginning of the title. Simply start the page title with the main keyword created for the page. The recommended maximum length of a title is 50-80 characters. Don’t insert advertising slogans in the title; search engines don't like that. Try to make the title as informative as possible.

The next tag we are going to analyze is description.

Although we often hear that this meta tag is not taken into account in page indexing, it still plays an important role in site promotion. Google provides some recommendations about how to write a description. The primary recommendations are the following:

1. Create a unique description for each page. Using identical information for several pages is not at all useful. Google analyzes each page description and if it finds out that they are similar, it skips them.

2. If possible, create a description that reflects the exact page content. Insert some detailed information. For example, if you sell recovery shirts, add the following text to the description tag:

Find the full Google article and instructions here:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264&topic=8522#writegooddescriptions

Keywords

Use a unique set of keywords for each page.

author

This tag indicates the site owner and the site author. It is not displayed in search engine results but search engines include this tag in their database. To change this tag in your Avactis store, you need to modify the following template:

avactis-themes/system/pages/templates/page.template.tpl.html

There are many free services on the Internet that allow you to check your website. Some of them emulate search engine bots. Others will check your link integrity, headers, and page-rank and present the results in a convenient way.

Some of useful services are listed below.

Google bot simulators:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/se-bot-simulator.html

http://web-2-you.com/com_wrapper.Itemid-58.html

Check links integrity tool:

http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php

PageRank checker:

http://www.checkpagerank.net/index.php