Product SEO Settings

OVERVIEW

SEO is a popular acronym used for "search engine optimization," or the practice of optimizing websites and content to be easily and efficiently indexed by search engines.  The benefits of doing this include having your products possibly appear in the search results for search engines like Bing and Google, but also to further optimize the search results on your own website.

REQUIREMENTS

The following pre-requisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

  • Access to your Hotcakes store administration
  • General knowledge of SEO

GETTING STARTED

The only things you need to know and do before getting started is to have your site up and running - even if it's only locally - and have one or more products added to your catalog.  Those products can be of any kind.  Make sure you're in your Hotcakes Administration area before you proceed (if you're following along).

We are going to take the product edit view and break it down section by section for you.

Product SEO Settings

We have an edited screen capture of the product edit view below.  Click it anytime to see it in a larger window.  This screen capture omits a couple of sections that do not pertain to SEO.

SEO settings in the product edit view

The table below will describe the highlighted SEO fields in the order that they appear in the edit view and how they can help your store's SEO strategy, if used properly.

Field Name Description
Name This value is very often wrapped in a H1 or H2 tag by designers to reinforce the content of the page to search engines. It would be most powerful if this value is similar to the Meta Title field listed below.
Searchable If checked, the product will be marked appropriately so that it can be found in the onsite search engine. The page ROBOTS meta tag is not managed by this setting.
Image Description This value will be inserted into the ALT attribute of the image tag.  This helps search engines understand what is in your image.
Alternate Search Keywords These keywords are only used for the onsite search engine. These keywords are useful to help your customers find products using keywords that you don't want to appear in the HTML output of the page. Useful ideas for this may include typos, superlatives, and competitive terms.
Meta Keywords These keywords will appear in the appropriate meta tag of the HTML of your resulting web page.  Keywords are not valued as much by search engines as they were in the past, but can still help your SEO.
Meta Title This represents the title that you want your page to have.  This should in some way reflect the product name for best results, and it will be the text that visitors see on the top of the browser window or tab.
Meta Description This should be a shorter and keyword-rich version of description of the product.  This value is still of some value to search engines.
Page Name This value defines the end of the URL of your product.  Like with the Meta Title and Name fields, this field should somewhat reflect the product name to produce the best results.

 

 

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