How do I set up meta tags for my site?

Zen Cart is built with a feature to have separate meta tags for each Category and Products – separate from the ones on general pages.

Categories

To define meta tags for a Category, go to the Admin > Catalog > Categories/Products. Once you’re there, click on the meta tag icon (the last one to the right for any given category) and set your content.

Note: A meta tag entry on this screen must contain something in the keywords and description fields or it is not considered complete, and will be ignored.

Products

If you want to define meta tags for individual Products, you will navigate to that product using Admin > Catalog > Categories/Products, and click on the meta tag icon (last one on the right) to define it.

Note: there are custom settings in Product Types so if you don’t want, for example, products_price in the title, you can globally set the defaults for 1 or all product types.

Common Site-Wide

To define site-wide tags such as charset, keywords and description, go to /includes/languages/english/YOURTEMPLATE/meta_tags.php and edit that file. Set the keywords, site title, site tagline and site description.

Custom Site-Wide

For meta tags not covered by the previous paragraph, edit includes/templates/YOURTEMPLATE/common/html_header.php. Open it up and add your own meta tag to those already there by default.

PAGE-SPECIFIC Title, Description

For pages which only display “one thing”, and are not dynamic lists or product/category/etc you can edit /includes/languages/english/YOURTEMPLATE/meta_tags.php, and create specific definitions for those items there.

Just follow the pattern as explained:

// Home Page Only:  define('HOME_PAGE_META_DESCRIPTION', '');
  define('HOME_PAGE_META_KEYWORDS', '');

// NOTE: If HOME_PAGE_TITLE is left blank (default) then TITLE and SITE_TAGLINE will be used instead.
  define('HOME_PAGE_TITLE', ''); // usually best left blank

// EZ-Pages meta-tags.  Follow this pattern for all ez-pages for which you desire custom metatags. Replace the # with the EZ-Page id.
// If you wish to use defaults for any of the 3 items for a given page, simply do not define it.
// (ie: the Title tag is best not set, so that site-wide defaults can be used.)
// repeat pattern as necessary
  define('META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_EZPAGE_#','');
  define('META_TAG_KEYWORDS_EZPAGE_#','');
  define('META_TAG_TITLE_EZPAGE_#', '');

// Per-Page meta-tags. Follow this pattern for individual pages you wish to override. This is useful mainly for additional pages.
// replace "page_name" with the UPPERCASE name of your main_page= value, such as ABOUT_US or SHIPPINGINFO etc.
// repeat pattern as necessary
  define('META_TAG_DESCRIPTION_page_name','');
  define('META_TAG_KEYWORDS_page_name','');
  define('META_TAG_TITLE_page_name', '');