"How do the META and TITLE tags work ?"

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Short Description

This article only applies to users of the search engine optimized shopping cart.

There are a few important things to note:

1. The shopping cart software automatically creates the TITLE and Meta Tags for you even if you do not fill anything in.
2. You can override the default with your own META tags and TITLE tags.
3. It is important to immediately begin with accurate TITLE and META tags to avoid being dropped by the search engines.

Detailed Explanation

Below is a more in depth explanation of each item above:

1. You will see that although your META and TITLE tags are empty in the shopping cart manager, that they still appear on your site.  This information is created in the following manner:
   1. The TITLE tags are created using the item and category names.
   2. The META tags are created using the item detailed descriptions, and the category headers (if you are not using these, then default META tags will not be created).
   You can verify that this is working by viewing the source code of your online store.  If the name of the item, or description/header is long, then the shopping cart software will automatically truncate (or shorted) to the ideal length that META tags should be.
2. To create your own META tags and TITLE tags, edit your product, or category.  On each of these, you will see a section for search engine optimized settings. However, it is VERY important to read the next item.
3. The reason the shoping cart software automatically generates META tags for you is for a few reasons:
   1. Search engines require that every single word in your META tags can also be found on the page content (the stuff that real people can see). Since the shopping cart software can does this automatically for you, you avoid the risk of breaking that rule.  and since we grab the most relevant data, it is theoretically one of the best ways to build your META tags.
   2. The other reason we do it is to help you avoid penalties in the search engines.  If you launched your online store today, and did not include TITLE tags and such, then the search engines may index your site and give you a penalty.  give you poor rankings, and making it nearly impossible to recover in many cases.  It's much more complicated than this short explanation, and involves Google's supplemental index (now officially deprecated but still the rules apply), but the point is, creating default META tags for you is the safest and fastest way for the search engines to get you good rankings to start with.