Optimizing for search engines

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is both important and often misunderstood. There's probably as much misinformation on the Internet about SEO as there is good, solid advice.

While we don't have the opportunity or space to go into great detail about SEO in this book, we can help you establish good practices that can reap great rewards in terms of increasing your search engine visibility and helping online shoppers know what you're offering.

Meta fields are data that are stored in the HTML code of a web page. Customers can't see this code, as it's not displayed by the browser, but search engines can see this data (in fact, they can see everything under the hood). Google, Bing, and others use this meta data in conjunction with many other analyzed items on your page to determine how to present your site to search users, including rank and content.

Using meta fields for search engine visibility

It begins with a basic understanding of how search engines use meta fields...