Zen Cart SEO | Optimize Meta Tags

B. How to Optimize the Meta tags of Your Category and Products Pages

ZenCart pulls the database information automatically for each category and product page and places it in the meta tags. The information includes product name, title, model, price, title/tagline. This is fine if you don’t know much about the benefits of optimizing your web site however if you want to make your pages more search engine friendly, don’t just use the default settings.

Zen Cart enables you to define custom keywords for every category and product page.

1. Create optimized text for your product descriptions

If my page is about Remington Stainless Steel Sinks then I need to include this keyword phrase in the content on the page as well as in the meta tags. The content should contain at least a a paragraph or 2 about the product as search engines love well written descriptive content.

2. Customize the Categories Meta Tags

Go to the Categories section of your admin panel. You will see a round Meta Tags icon on the far right under “action”. If the icon is black and white, custom keywords have not been defined. Click on the icon and a page will open allowing you to enter custom Meta Title, Keywords, and Description tags.

* Include your main keyword or keyword phrase at the beginning of your title meta tag, then add your business name at the end.

* Create an attractive description for your category that will entice visitors to look deeper into your site.

* Add approximately 10 of your main keywords to the keywords meta tag.

* Click save

Your category page is now optimized for the search engines.

3. Customize the Products Meta Tags

* The top of each product page displays a box titled: “Mark What the Product’s Meta Tag Title Should Include:”

* Under this line are check boxes for product name, title, model, price, title/tagline. Uncheck price, title/tagline then enter your description and keywords in the boxes below. Zencart will automatically pull the product name, title and model from the database. (You can add your own tags if you don’t want to use these).

* Click preview to preview the changes.

* Click update to make the changes permanent.

Repeat the above procedure for each of your product pages. Make sure you include the name and model number for each product. If people are searching for that specific model, chances are your page will appear at the top of the search engines because you are the only one that optimized a page specifically for that model.

Customizing your meta tags for every page, will boost your rankings and increase your traffic and sales.

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Attract 1000s of NEW visitors to your Zen Cart Web Site by learning
highly effective “Article Marketing Strategies

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

Comments

  1. Hi,
    Read your article and am a little confused on the meta tag – SEO.

    Most websites I have seen show the company name first >> Category or Product >> price etc.

    Why do you say to create the title phrase and at the end put the company name.

    So many conflicting stories and articles. It is really difficult these days to get some good solid answers.

    Kind regards
    Bob Ginn

  2. Hi Robert,

    The only case for placing your company name first would be for branding and recognition. I’d prefer to get my site ranked based on my main keyword which gets more searches than the company name which leads to more sales.

    You would still get top rankings for your company name if it’s placed at the end as probably no other store uses it.

  3. Call me old school but I prefer to go in and edit my specific meta tags title tags etc through the meta_tags.php text document for most of my clients Zen Cart Websites. From there is pretty simple if you use the ez page # I know that you can go through the actual admin section of the Zen Cart software on the back end but I guess its just personal preference am I missing anything by doing so?
    Derrick

  4. Whil SEO seems like a large mountain that needs to be climbed, there a also some basic steps required

  5. I do agree with all the ideas you have presented in your post. They are very convincing and will definitely work. Thanks for the post.

  6. I {just had|would love} to {comment|write} and say what {a great|an outstanding} job you did on this. {Clearly|Obviously}, you have put a lot of {work|time} into it.

  7. I love comments… I just started my blog a week ago, and have already received comments from a few people. (TechnoSpud and Cool Cat Teacher, of course) Wow!! How rewarding is that??

  8. I agree with Herman.His all article is very helpful for Zen cart.Title,Description & keyword these three things are very important for search engine.

  9. This is my first time using zen cart and found this blog to be very very helpful. This blog is my favourite!
    Thanks Herman for the good tutorial.

  10. Arisyia…You’re welcome.

  11. I work for a Atlanta Search Engine Optimization company and I have to wonder if this is even is necessary?

  12. This article is invaluable, I completely enjoyed it, I will be back for more!

  13. This is by far our favourite blog. We are from the http://www.instituteofonlinebusiness.com.au and are recommendig this blog to our clients. we hope this ok. Well done.

  14. Thanks, I am going to use these tips for my site Daystar Distributing http://www.daystardistributing.com. Where can you manually update the Tags?

  15. I am extremely impressed with your writing skills as well as with the layout on your weblog. Is this a paid theme or did you customize it yourself? Anyway keep up the nice quality writing, it is rare to see a great blog like this one nowadays

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