Dynamic Meta Tags

[msimplay]

Hi I noticed OSC max has dynamic meta tag generator .

However the best way of SEO optimising is to actually create the meta data yourself.

Meta descriptions and Meta tags.

It would be better to be able to create your own meta tags rather than dynamic ones as a default.

I remember once having installed dynamic meta tags and me being interested in more sales I asked the SEO expert is this a good way to do it and he was blunt and told me the best way is to manually edit every product.

Title
meta description
meta tags

Any thoughts ?

[michael_s]

more meta-tag sillyness...

Meta tags are all but irrelevant regarding seo. As long as you keep them from being duplicates and make sure they are relevant to the page content (like they are with the dynamic tags) you will be indexed just fine. Google puts extremely little weight on meta tags, since they are so easily abused.

Spend your time on quality inbound links and you will soon forget all about meta tags.

If you really want to waste your time by manually keying them in, simply add the standard osCommerce Header Tags module and you are good to go (found at addons.oscommerce.com). At most a 20 minute installation into osCmax.

[msimplay]

As far as I know it's not nonsense even according to googles own documentation for SEO basics.

I know that quality inbound links carry a lot of SEO weight but meta tags tell the search engines what content you have.

One of the most basic things I did when I didn't have any inbound links was
to change the title tag to match the name of the product and add keywords to the descriptions.
This took me to page rank 1

http://www.google.com/webmasters/doc...rter-guide.pdf

Btw does the standard osCommerce Header Tags module play nice with the already installed dynamic header tags contribution ?

[michael_s]

If you are convinced you need to manually do it, go for it. The mod I referred you to will do the trick, and is very easy to add to osCmax. It doesn't have to play nice with the dynamic tags mod, as it replaces it.

I should clarify. I agree that meta tags are needed, and wasn't questioning that. My point is that there is absolutely no benefit to manually entering them, whatsoever. Just tweak the dynamic system to match your preferences and off you go. It is very easy to change the product pages to just display the product name.

The dynamic system already allows for customizing the different pages output:
http://wiki.oscdox.com/set_up_meta_tags
http://wiki.oscdox.com/custom_meta_tags

[msimplay]

Hi thanks that makes a lot more sense to me now
Some useful information there