Advanced SEO Features

15 May 2011

Our most recent release had a large focus on search engine optimisation (SEO). We've introduced some great new features to help you optimise your Smallfish shops for search engines. We've also added the ability to verify your shops with major online services such as Google Webmaster Tools.

Custom Meta-Tags & Page Titles

One of our most common feature requests has been the ability to customise meta-tags on Smallfish shop pages. Meta-tags are hidden information that is available to search engines and are very useful for shop owners who wish to tweak their search engine performance. To compliment this we have added full control over the page title which appears in title bar of your browser and at the top of search results.

See below for an example Google search result, showing the page title (in purple) and the meta description (in black). Both of these items can now be fully customised for each page, product and category. Note that Google will sometimes display text from the page in place of the meta description.

To set these options, look for the SEO Settings (Advanced) link in the right sidebar of each page. Note that you do not need to manually set meta-tags in your products unless you want to.

We recommend keeping your page titles below 65 characters in length and your meta-description about 120-155 characters long. Meta-keywords are ignored by all the major search engines and is included for completeness only. It is important that the information entered into these fields relates to the information on the page itself. Search engines will heavily penalise pages if they determine the information is misleading.

Although these features do influence search engines it is important to note that the search engine providers have the ultimate control over how a page ranks and appears within their system. The performance of each shop will vary based on a large range of factors, including the content and performance of other sites that are targetting the same audience. It may also take some time for your changes to be reflected in searches. The other key ranking factors are as important as ever, including good page content (i.e. product descriptions and info page text) and inbound links from other relevant, quality websites.

Site Verifications

Some products, such as Google, ask you to verify that you are the owner of a site before providing access to certain features. To do this, you are asked to add a site verification meta-tag to your site. You can now do this via the Site Verifications section of the Connections page, in your Manage Shop area.

The most common use of this feature is to enable Google Webmaster Tools, a free service provided by Google which provides valuable insight into your search engine performance. We highly recommend you give it a go.