Why is this important. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is what helps your customers find you.
Why am I doing this tutorial? Because I was under a mistaken impression about what BISI's SEO fields did.
How did I come to this misunderstanding???
When you enter an item into inventory you see an SEO tab. This tab gives you some guidance. I have put the text into 2 lines so that the picture would fit into this section of the webpage. On the screen in the dashboard it is all in one line. Here is the picture. Below the picture I will explain my confusion.
As you can see, it says "You can customize your products title, keywords and meta description values, to improve search engine rankings. These are optional fields and we will automatically fill them in if you do not provide any information."
OK - I interpreted, or misinterpreted I should say, this to mean if I did not fill out any information, some sort of BISI programming magic would be able to go through my item description and pull out keywords and a description that would work for this item for the robots to see. Somehow in my logic, I thought that the keywords and descriptions that the system would make would be item specific, and probably better than I could do on my own.
Lets get started.
Step # 1
The first thing you need to do to get your Search Engine Optimization done is do the name, keywords, and description metags for your whole store, not one particular item. To do this, go from your admin dashboard to Marketing, SEO.
BISI does all the hard formatting stuff for the meta tags for you. But you still have to enter the information. For purposes of this tutorial, I expanded on the examples shown under the boxes to change my store from a web site set up store to Joe's Widget Warehouse. I put in the description for my store that I want the search engines to see. They robots like you when you use 200 characters or less for the description. I put in keywords followed by commas after the word or keyword phrase. Keywords should generally be less than 20 words and use 200 characters or less.
For each item you sell in your store there is an SEO tab. To see what I am talking about, lets go to an inventory item and look at it. To get there go from your dashboard to catalog, manage products (sorry - had my cursor on the wrong button).
From manage products, select an inventory item by clicking on the name (not the picture.)
The fifth tab in is the SEO tab for your specific item. You can see the text here that I referenced in the first picture.
At this point I am going to leave the SEO fields blank on my item page. I believe that the BISI magic SEO optimizator will create my optimized SEO for this item. Now I have to go get the web address for my item so that I can let an SEO meta tag analyzer look at it and see the great results of what it created for me. To do this, I will click on preview store.
My storefront will open, and I will click on my item so that I can see the URL or web address of my specific item. I will highlight the address and copy it.
I then go to http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html to have an analyzer look at the results. As you can see below I entered my item URL into the analyzer. The box is drawn around the results. It took the name that I entered on the main SEO page and added my product title to it. I left the title, keywords of my item, and the description box blank. As you can see from this analysis, it filled in those blanks with the store SEO information that I created about widgets that has absolutely nothing to do with my item's description. Depending on what your store's main SEO information says it might have some relevance to your item. Because my store does not sell widgets at all, I don't have much relevance in my SEO for my item at all.
In the picture you can see the results of my misunderstanding of the SEO instructions on the item inventory page. BISI SEO is not magically, with some program, creating SEO meta tags for me. It is using the SEO meta tag information that I entered for my main page. And if by chance, you have not entered your SEO information on the main page, you will not have meta tags at all for your description or keywords.
Step #2
Now that you understand what your title, keywords, and descriptions will look like if you do not enter the information on the item page, you will most likely want to enter that information for yourself on your item page. So as a reminder - On tab five in your item inventory you will want to put keywords (maximum of 20 words and 200 characters for robot friendliness) and descriptions (maximum of 200 characters for robot friendliness) and save. You can always use a free meta tag analyzer on the web to give you an indication of how relevant your keywords and descriptions are to the content on your page. If every word that is used in your keywords is found on your page, the relevancy will be 100%, the same goes for the description. If you have words in your description, title, or keywords meta tags that are not on your page it will cause your relevancy to decrease and cause the robots not to like you as well. We like the robots to like us as somehow their opinion of us is used in the overall ranking of your page by the search engines.
This tutorial is more about explaining what BISI will do as far as metatag descriptions and keywords on your behalf so that you can make an educated choice on what you enter or don't enter on your SEO pages for your items. Should you choose not to enter SEO information for your store, and you do not enter it on the item description either - you won't have metatags at all. The robots really don't like that! Now you know what the robots will see if you do not enter SEO information on your items.
This concludes this tutorial
Disclaimer: BTG Designs is not affiliated with Buy It Sell It. The information you are being provided is based on the current abilities of the system and BTG Designs is not given privileged information concerning upcoming activities, releases, or events.
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