Meta Tags certainly do not carry the kind of importance that they used to have years ago. Today most search engines ignore the Keywords Meta Tag, and - according to most experts – Google's page ranking algorithm ignores both the Keywords and the Description Meta Tags.
Yet, Meta Tags still play a role in your overall search engine optimization strategy. For example, experts agree that the Title Meta Tag is still crucial to good page rankings.
Beyond search engines, a Title that matches the page content definitely makes sense and allows for better bookmarks, for example. So take advantage of the features mentioned below to associate good Meta Tags - especially the Title - with you store pages.
Imagine an e-commerce store that has 500 categories and 5,000 products: it would be close to impossible for the store manager to manually add Meta Tags to all of them one by one. The code that you have added to header.asp will take care of automatically creating the Title, Description, and Keyword Meta Tags for every page in the storefront (see how to properly create //header.asp//).
ProductCart will automatically generate them based on product and category information available in the store catalog. Let’s take a closer look at this feature and see how you can take advantage of it. First, confirm that your header.asp file contains the following code towards the top of the page.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> <!--#include file="include-metatags.asp"--> <html> <head> <%Session.LCID = 1033 if pcv_PageName<>"" then%> <title><%=pcv_PageName%></title> <%end if%> <%GenerateMetaTags()%> <%Response.Buffer=True%>
Among these lines of code are the ones that deal with the dynamic generation of Meta Tags. The following include statement:
<!--#include file="include-metatags.asp"-->
… loads onto the page the file that takes care of this task for you. The file is called include-metatags.asp and is found in the pc folder.
Meta tags are added to the page as follows, in the following order (e.g. think of a product details page):
Make sure to edit pc/include-metatags.asp before launching your store to replace the default content with yours. Otherwise, you will see that many of your pages carry the “ProductCart shopping cart software” Title tag. If that is the case, it means that the default tags still need to be edited.
To edit this file, do the following:
Const DefaultDescription = “We offer shopping cart software to run ecommerce stores. Our shopping carts are used by businesses to build and manage an online storefront.”
As the comments in the file indicate, you should not need to edit any other area of the file. If you are an advanced user, you can choose to edit other sections of the file to further customize the type and number of meta tags dynamically generated by ProductCart.