Search Engine Optimization for your Shops: Meta Tag Changes

One of the goals we’ve set for this year is to optimize our website and your shops for search engines.
We want to make it easier for the well-known search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN,…) to find your shop. You would then start to get free and first-rate visitors from the search engines who are (hopefully) there to buy your shirts. To make this all work like it should, a little effort also needs to be put in on your side.

Part 1 – Meta Element Changes
Shop meta tags will be the first change which will be undertaken (planned for mid-March, but could also be delayed by a few days).
In the future, we will automatically generate the meta tags (title, description, keywords) for your shop from information which you have provided in the user area.
Here’s how the meta tags will look in the future on a product detail page:

• Meta Title: Product Name | Shop Name 
(e.g. When I grow up, I am going to marry Math | Math Shirts)
• Meta Description: Product description
 (e.g. Order and buy a t-shirt with the saying “When I grow up, I am going to marry Math” at Math Shirts)
• Meta Keywords: Product keywords (e.g. When I grow up, I am going to marry Math, math shirts, I hate math, mathmagicians, Fibonacci, gauss, pythagorus)

If a visitor to your shop filters for men, the meta tags would look like this:

• Meta Title: Men | Shop Name
 (e.g. Men | Math Shirts)
• Meta Description: Order and find men’s math t-shirts, polo shirts, hoodies and other apparel at Math Shirts.
• Meta Keywords: math shirts, men t-shirts, men‘s hoodies, men’s polo shirts

The information for the meta tags on other pages is created from that which you have entered in “My Spreadshirt”.

This is where you enter the picture – a little “homework” for you
If you would like your shops to be found by the popular search engines, we recommend filling out the following information:

• Enter the meta title, meta description, meta keywords and author for your shop’s homepage. (Enter it here: “Your Spreadshirt > Shops > Settings > Metadata”)
• Enter title, description, keywords for a shop’s products. (Enter this information by going to “Your Spreadshirt > Products” and clicking on “Details” under the product image – it’s best to enter this information when you are creating a new product.)
• Your own categories – if you use your own categories, you should also enter a description next to the name of the category.

Please note that these changes mean that the meta tags which you use in your own header and footer will no longer work. As mentioned above, they will be automatically created for you by us.

That’s it for the first part of our search engine optimization.

The second part will be for partners who might have shops in Europe and will come later in the year when the shops will be “moved” to their relative country domains. This means that shopname.spreadshirt.net will become shopname.spreadshirt.co.uk for shops in the U.K. and shopname.spreadshirt.ie for shops in Ireland etc. Again, this change does not affect .com domains.

That’s just a little advanced notice for you. This process will take some time to complete, but we will let you know about the change a couple of weeks before it happens.

P.S. If you follow the guidelines set in our Spreadshirt SEO tutorial, you are most definitely on the right track.