24 Jan 01-12
Improving Shopify SEO: Several New Features!
Search engine optimization is the science - some say art - of convincing Google to show your web page or online store at the top of its results. If you can master SEO, your store will get lots of traffic and you’ll be flooded with sales. Best of all, SEO costs you nothing and is automatically built into Shopify.
Today we’re proud to announce several features that will make it easier to improve the SEO of your shop without modifying your store’s template files. With a few clicks, you can now change page title tags, the homepage’s meta description and your image alt tags.
Title Tags:
The title tag is one of the most important elements of your store’s SEO. The title tag appears as the clickable link on the search engine results page:
The
words used in the title are used by search engines to determine what a
web page is about. Here are a few things you need to consider when
writing your title tags:
- The closer the most important keywords are to the front of the title, the more helpful they will be for ranking.
- The first keyword spot in a title tag is very important, so if your brand doesn't have any weight, it may be best to place it at the end. However, if people recognize your brand, having the brand name at the beginning can help with getting you more clicks.
- 70 characters is the maximum number most search engines will display on their search results page.
- Make sure your title tag is actually readable! You don’t want it appearing as a just a bunch of search engine optimized keywords; your search results will just end up looking spammy.
Here are some good examples of title tags for products:
When editing the content of a product, collection, or page in Shopify, you can click ‘Edit title tag and URL’ in order to see the following options:
Meta Descriptions:
While meta descriptions won’t directly help move your online store up in the search results, they are an important factor that will affect whether people click it in the search results. Which of the following would you be more likely to click?
When
composing your descriptions, aim to create great ad copy that will draw
the user into your site. To set your store’s meta description, click
Preferences → General Settings. The content in the ‘Shop
Description’ box will populate the meta description for your homepage. Note that Search engines will list up to 140 characters of your meta
description below your title tag.
On pages other than the store homepage, most themes automatically set the meta description to the product description. If that is not the case with your store, please refer to the guide on Shopify SEO for Theme Designers.
Alt Tags:
Alt
tags are text that describes a pictures contents. Having descriptive
alt tags can help your product images show up in Google’s Image Search.
As well, alt tags are an important accessibility factor: they describe
your products images to visually impaired people.
Along with the launch of these new features, we are going to ensure all default Shopify themes have on-page best practices implemented, which include the recommendations made in Shopify's SEO 101. If you'd like some more information of the technical details of implementing these changes to your site, Julie has written a great post over on the technology blog covering what you need to know.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: I change an SEO setting and nothing happens on my website. Why?
A:
Your theme may not support the SEO features described above. You or
your designer/coder may need to implement the necessary liquid code into
your theme to allow certain functionality. Primarily the shop_title
tag to allow title editing ability, the shop.descrption tag to allow homepage meta descriptions and image.alt for alt tags.
Q: Where can I find Liquid information and best practices on SEO?
A: We’ve created a dedicated wiki page for information on implementing SEO best practices into your liquid code.
Q: Where can I find out more about SEO?
A:
If you’d like to learn more about SEO, you can refer to our wiki guide to
SEO. However if you are looking for more in-depth knowledge, our friends
over at SEOmoz have created the fantastic beginner’s guide to SEO.
Comments
January 24, 2012 02:30PM EST
Really, really great stuff.
January 24, 2012 02:43PM EST
This is such a good boost! Really should have been there from the beginning but better late than never. Our SEO score isn’t that bad atm but this will certainly help things more :]
January 24, 2012 03:04PM EST
Cool! Any plans for meta descriptions for product collection pages?
January 24, 2012 03:54PM EST
I have been lucky to A/B TEST with various techniques of SEO and have Top 10 listing of products on major search engines. Reverse engineering of competition works too.
TKD – Title ~ Keyword ~ Description
January 24, 2012 04:15PM EST
Leaving out custom descriptions still shows that Shopify doesn’t fully “get it”. A meta description is extremely important to allow site owners to customize for every page of their website. It should not default to the first couple sentences of the content. How I write a product description for meta tags (and thus search engines) is very different from how I write a full product description.
However, the custom title tags for products is a huge step in the right direction (finally, several years later)
January 24, 2012 05:24PM EST
och, we need it for each page :( We already have it for our homepage.
January 24, 2012 10:32PM EST
This is really good, my Shopify store is new and I’m keen to boost my SEO ranking, this will help a lot. Thanks!
January 25, 2012 11:51AM EST
Eric/Derek/Gemma: We’re working hard on adding a lot of SEO features over the next while. Stay tuned!
January 25, 2012 03:54PM EST
Sounds good. I’ll be looking forward to seeing our the new addons :-) Keep up the good work!
January 26, 2012 12:53AM EST
Derek is right. Not implementing this functionality for descriptions for each page dramatically shows Shopify doesnt get it.
These would have been nicer additions if implemented over 2 years ago.
Why on earth would you not also have allowed meta descriptions to be modified along with titles?
Sorry Shopify you have been great but this update is still SO wanting. Im off to BigCommerce.
January 26, 2012 01:12PM EST
I’m really glad you guys are improving on this. Now if I could only change my homepage title to not say “Welcome” Even though I have a page title set, it doesn’t show up, unless I modify the template, and then every takes on that title.
January 26, 2012 09:03PM EST
hmm…I need to go back and check out what I have for titles and descriptions – Im used to having to write my descriptions to be used as the meta tags as well – I make my first few lines for that then add in the main description so that its more informative, wonder if that works ok.
January 27, 2012 08:23AM EST
title tags are important, so better concentrate on getting accurate keywords. http://www.walkdeals.com
January 27, 2012 05:35PM EST
Thank you so much!
January 27, 2012 07:20PM EST
I love it. Learning every day and having Shopify in my corner is great. Keep up the good work!
January 27, 2012 09:26PM EST
I would like to get rid of the Welcome too. I tried to change the title tag and meta description as described above and none of it worked. Right now my meta description is what I have have posted for new blogs! What a waste it is no wonder I am having problems getting traffic to my site.
January 28, 2012 02:23AM EST
Shopify how do we change the " – Welcome " from the homepage??? on the screenshots on this article you use as example your homepage “shopify – Online Store Software & Hosted Ecommerce Solutions” we NEED to be able to change the meta title on the homepage without modifying store template files…
January 28, 2012 09:22AM EST
these new SEO fields are great, but the best thing you could do to help me with google is to add a UPC field to each product variant since mine are all unique. I’ve seen several threads with other users wanting the same thing.
January 29, 2012 04:23PM EST
Great to see that you are making progress on SEO title tags and meta description. We have been using a meta data app for this. What I really would like is to be able to create unique title tags and meta descriptions for all my products AND all my pages of site.
January 29, 2012 04:24PM EST
Great to see that you are making progress on SEO title tags and meta description. We have been using a meta data app for this. What I really would like is to be able to create unique title tags and meta descriptions for all my products AND all my pages of site.
January 29, 2012 08:16PM EST
This is a great step in the right direction.
Some suggestions:
1) When exporting your product catalog to Google or Amazon, it would be great to either a) honor the title tags if set or b) give the user an option to use either just the title or title tag. On our own site a product might be called “Sun”, but on Google/Amazon that title is useless. There we would want the title tag to be displayed.
Examples:
:: Our site: http://hingeheads.com/products/sun
:: Amazon: http://goo.gl/NuPOu
2) For title and alt tags, it would be great to have a more automated way to generate these. It’s not really practical to write ALT tags for 100s of images. You would want to define a general description with variables (expressions) to include the product name.
I just completed editing all our title/alt tags, only to realize I had to redo them after an edit :(
Hope this helps.
Kai
February 01, 2012 03:28PM EST
About time. Shopify is a great product but this is something that was sorely missing. Meta title and description should be available across all pages.
I am running an e-commerce business as my background is SEO. In the absence of the meta fields previously, I have managed to get good Google search results for my products by use of the Blog provided by Shopify. Search engines like relevant content and every time I had a new product, I wrote a blog article about it with a link to the product.
Another must to generate sales is to take full of advantage of the fabulous instant upload provided by Shopify to Google’s Product base. By carefully entering key words within your product text, this will be reflected within Google’s product base. I reckon that due to the range of products available matching key word searches within the base, that once someone lands here, they will find what they are after without having to trawl back through internet page results. An absolute must to upload your products here.
Alison.
February 04, 2012 05:32AM EST
I agree with Gillian. I need to be able to write seperate meta, title and descriptions that are specific for EVERY page. Not having this ability is a missing a trick, and not allowing you to change this is very bad in my opinion. No point in putting work into adding products etc, if they are all going to show up as the same description, if this isn’t sorted soon, I will be off to a different Shop site, or just build my own. Can’t believe how bad the SEO is on these shops till I joined. Disapointed so far.
February 07, 2012 10:16PM EST
Derek is right, product and page descriptions are very necessary, having a product page on position 3 or 4 of google is all good but if the description isn’t tuned perfectly you could still miss out on valuable clicks!
February 15, 2012 11:03AM EST
Hello, glad to see some progress with the SEO. Was disappointed your custom CMS didn’t have half as many features as WordPress.
I am now adding ALT tags to all of my images. Am sorry this option wasn’t there when I was uploading them one-by-one.
Now I have to edit them one-by-one, unless there is a bulk way to do it?
Let me know,
Thanks
Jennifer at CanadianNativeProducts.com