Shopify.com is an all-in-one ecommerce solution for users looking for a quick and easy way to begin selling products online. A simple and intuitive system, Shopify allows users to create and customize their own ecommerce website in minutes. Despite it’s appeal, especially among first-time web sellers, Shopify does present some challenges, particularly in areas of SEO.

In dealing with a template-based system such as Shopify, making SEO-friendly changes to your site can be a headache. The main problem in terms of SEO that many users report with Shopify is the difficulty in creating custom Title tags and Meta tags. We recently began optimizing a client’s site that was being hosted on Shopify.com and ran into some similar problems.

After scouring Shopify’s forums, piecing together bits of information, and tweaking the code, we came up with a relatively simple way to include custom tags on your Shopify site.

To create tags, you need to add conditionals to the “theme.liquid” file of your site (bold portion). Here is the technique that we used:

{% case page_title %}
{% when null %}
<title>{{shop.name}} - {{page_title}}</title>
{% when ‘Your Page Title’ %}
<title>Your Custom Title Here</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Your Custom Keywords Here” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Your Custom Description Here” />
{% else %}
<title>{{shop.name}} | {{page_title}}</title>
{% assign maxwords = 20 %}
{% assign indexblog = ‘frontpage’ %}

{% case template %}
{% when ‘collection’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}{% if collection.description.size > 0 %}: {{collection.description | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content= “{{collection.title}}{% if collection.tags.size > 0 %}: {{ collection.tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}{% endif %}” />
{% when ‘product’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}{% if product.description.size > 0 %}: {{product.description | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{product.title}}{% if product.tags.size > 0 %}: {{ product.tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}{% endif %}”>
{% when ‘page’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}: {{page.content | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{page_title}}”>
{% when ‘blog’ %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{page_title}}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”{{page_title}}”>
{% else %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{shop.name}}{% if blogs.[indexblog].articles.size > 0 %}: {% for article in blogs.[indexblog].articles limit:1 %}{{ article.title }}: {{article.content | strip_html | truncatewords:maxwords}}{% endfor %}{% endif %}”/>
<meta name=”keywords” content= “{% for link in linklists.Main-Menu.links %}{% if link.type == ‘collection_link’ %}{{link.title}} {% endif %}{% endfor %}” />
{% endcase %}

{% endcase %}

Use the bolded conditional statements above for each page that you wish to create customs tags for. For example, if your page was titled “Welcome”, your conditional might look something like this:

{% when ‘Welcome’ %}
<title>T-Shirt Printers | T-Shirt Customization</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”t-shirt printing, personalized t-shirts” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Create and customize your own t-shirt” />

This is just one of many ways to create title and meta tags for your Shopify site. There are also several other factors that go into making your Shopify site SEO friendly (internal linking, sitemap, url redirects, etc). Start by creating custom, keyword-focused title and meta tags, and your Shopify site will begin to climb the search engine rankings.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Case Study, Examples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.