Set Up Meta Tags
Shift4Shop makes it easy for you to have SEO meta tags on your web pages. Furthermore, your meta tags can be fully customized as you please.
Meta Tags
Meta elements provide information about a given webpage and are most often used to help search engines categorize pages correctly. By design, they are often inserted into the HTML code but are not visible to a user looking at the site. The most commonly used meta tags are the meta keywords, meta description and meta abstract tags.
Keywords:
The "keywords" meta tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with the content of your page. These keywords should be relevant to the content of the page since some search engines use these tags to also detect spam content.Description:
The "description" meta tag provides a concise explanation of a web page's content. This allows the webpage author to give a more meaningful description for listings than what might otherwise be displayed if the search engine was to automatically create its own description; based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates as well. The major search engines also consider keywords located in the description meta tag when ranking pages.Abstract:
The "abstract" meta tag is very similar to the description meta tag, except its intended as more of a brief summary of the description meta tag. Generally, the abstract meta tag is a one line sentence which gives an overview of the entire webpage. Although search engines do not use this tag as often as the first two, it is a useful complement to search engines that read the first few lines of text of your webpages.
Some other meta tags exist but these are mostly used for internal controls, like author, channel, date, etc. There's also a robots meta tag which is really only useful when you want to exclude your web pages from Search Engines.
Setting up the Meta Tags
Product Pages
Shift4Shop helps dynamically create custom meta tags for all your product pages as you're actively adding products. This function uses the information from the product name, category, description and keywords fields (found in the Product's Information Tab) to create the description and keywords meta tags.
You also have the ability to manually specify your own custom meta tags for each product if you wish. This can be done from your Online Store Manager by going to the product's Meta Tags tab located on each product listing.
Category Pages
The meta tags for your Category pages can be set up from the Online Store Manager by going to Products and clicking on the Categories button located at the top right of the page. Hover over your selected category, and go to the far right of the listing to click on its Details link.
Once there, you will see the meta tags field within the "SEO Title and Meta tags" section, just above the Product Display area.
Aside from your Product and Category Pages, you can also edit meta tags for just about every page on your store.
Home Page
The home page meta tags can be set up from your Online Store Manager's Content > Titles and Content section. Once there, you should see an alphabetical listing of your store's main pages. Look for "home" and click on its Action > Edit button (at the far right) to access the meta tags section for the page.
Content Pages
For site content pages like About Us, Contact Us, Terms and Conditions and others, meta tags may be specified by going to Content > Site Content and clicking the Action > Content button for the respective page. As with the Titles and Content section, you also have the ability to use the Tag Wizard on Site Content pages in order to help you format the meta tags properly.
Blog Articles
Finally, for Blog Articles, you can specify meta tag information by going to your Online Store Manager's Content > Articles page and clicking on the Action > Edit button (at the far right) for the respective article. When viewing the article, click on its SEO button to access the meta tags section (including the Tag Wizard").