The SEO Manager Plugin automatically generates SEO friendly TITLE, META Description and META Keyword tags for every page and for every Category, Product, and Webpage in your AbleCommerce® store. It also provides the ability to manually enter your own TITLE and META content. It also moves the title and META tags to the top of the page. The finer control of text will and better positioning improve the pages' rank in search engines.
What are META tags?
META tags contain information about the web page you are viewing. They are not meant to be seen by the end-user, but they are read by your web server, and, more importantly by search engine agents: 'search bots'.
The most important META tags are <TITLE>, <DESCRIPTION> and <KEYWORDS>.
While you can see the TITLE output in your browser's window title, you can view meta tags in your storefront by selecting View...Source (or View...Page Source). Near the top of the text file that opens you'll see a tag that looks like <meta name="description" content="Some pretty long description about your site."> and <meta name="keywords" content="Category1 Category2 A Product Name">
Why are META tags important?
Search engines, such as Google® and Altavista®, send out agents, 'search bots', that index your site. They use the META Title, Description and META Keywords decide what's really important in your site's content. Relevant and descriptive META tag content will result in a higher positioning of your site when a user enters a keyword found in a TITLE, META Description or META Keywords tag.
The most important of these tags is the <TITLE> tag. As the 'search engine bot' navigates your site, it accumulates and indexes the content of all the <TITLE> tags it encounters. That's why the W2M SEO Manager automatically outputs all your Category names, Product names, and Webpage* names in <TITLE> tags.
When your site is listed in a search engine results page, it will display the contents of the META Description tag adjacent to the page title.
* Webpages, when capitalized refer to AbleCommerce object Webpages that can be created in the admin like Products and Categories.
How the W2M SEO Manager works
The W2M SEO Manager outputs a default TITLE and META Description and META Keyword for every page and for every Category, Product, and Webpage in your AbleCommerce® store. You may, however, override that default individually for each Category, Product, or Webpage.
The default META Tags for Categories, Products, and Webpages are:
- Categories:
- Title: Category Name @ Store Name
- Description: Category Name - Category Description @ Store Name
- Keywords: Category Trail + Summary + Description
- Products:
- Title: Product Name @ Store Name
- Description: Product Name - Product Brief Description @ Store Name NOTE: If the Brief Description is blank then the first 1000 characters of the Standard Description will be used.
- Keywords: Product Name + Search Keywords + Category Trail
- Webpages:
- Title: Webpage Name @ Store Name
- Description: Webpage Name - Webpage Description @ Store Name
- Keywords: Webpage Name Category Trail
NOTE: All descriptions will have any HTML tags stripped out of them.
Manually Entering Tags
Custom content can be put in for TITLE, META Keyword, and META Description on the edit pages for Categories, Products, and Webpages. The SEO manager then wraps this content in the proper html tags and inserts it into the HTMLHead box on the edit page. In addition, you can enter other META content into the box and save the entire content.
Description and Keyword Dynamic Variables:
The following variables may be inserted into manually entered tags to generate automatic output (be sure to include the brackets in your code).
- [store] - Outputs the Name of the Store, e.g. W2M Store Front.
- [name] - Outputs the Name of the current Category, Product, or Webpage, e.g. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Other pages will display the page name, e.g. billinfo
- [summary] - Outputs the Summary or Short Description of the current Category, Product, or Webpage, e.g. Wes Craven's classic 1984 horror film. Other pages won't display anything.
- [description] - Outputs the Description of the current Category, Product, or Webpage. Products display the Brief Description, e.g. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 American horror film directed and written by Wes Craven, and the first film of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise... Other pages won't display anything.
- [breadcrumb] - Outputs the Category Trail of the current Category, Product, or Webpage. This is the current category and any parent categories, e.g. Movies > DVD > Horror. Other pages won't display anything.
- [searchkeywords] - Outputs the Search Keywords of the current Product (Products only), e.g. Freddie, Kruger, Cravin, Kreuger, Nitemare. Other pages won't display anything.