Metadata is data (information) that provides information about other data.

Metadata will not be displayed on the page but is machine parsable so can be used by browsers, search engines or other web services to understand more about the page they are displaying.

The common meta tags use on web pages and those supported in Catfish are Description and Keywords.

Description:

Sometimes used by search engines as the descriptive black text in the search result listing, meta descriptions can help increase the customer click through in search results but will not necessarily impact rankings directly.

Keywords:

Although Meta keywords ceased to impact rankings in 2009, people still use them, albeit with caution.

Title Tags:

Title tags are still the single most important piece of metadata on the page. 

The best title tags begin with the most relevant keywords, product name, or article name and end with the name of the site

To set these up on your Catfish storefront you have a number of options.

Storefront wide:

Under Configuration > Settings > General and Miscellaneous Settings : SEO settings tab, you have a number of options to configure.

Page title separator is as the name suggests the the character (or series of characters) that you wish to use to separate your page titles.

Default title will appear as the page title on ALL your website pages, so think carefully before adding text here.

Default meta keywords will get appended as the keyword meta data your ALL your website pages.

Default meta description will get appended as the meta description on ALL your website pages.

Home Page Meta Title allows you to set the page title for just your websites home page. A new setting we added recently in order to provide you with more flexibility.

Home Page Keywords are keywords, again that you can setup just for your website homepage

Home Page Description is the description that you can write that will only populate the home page meta description

As well as these default SEO settings, you will also find a SEO tab on your category pages, product pages and topic pages that give you complete control over the meta data that gets used on each of your pages.

To note: If you do not want the same meta data to be used on all your pages then leave the Default entries blank. Enter in the text for your homepage and then ensure that each of your product, category and topic pages have custom entries for Title, Keyword (if you wish to use it) and Description.