Meta tags are hidden behind a page, so are not visible to the website visitor but search engines can still see them. Each category and product will allow you to enter keywords specific to that item. These keywords are used by some search engines. Pearl will use your default meta keywords (edit at Setup - Other - Website) unless a product or category has it’s own unique meta keywords.

Meta keywords should be relevant to that page or product, and you should group words in to keyword phrases of 2 or 3 words. Do not add more that 8-10 phrases per page or product, any more than this will most likely be ignored. A good rule of thumb for keywords is "less is more" and keep them relevant at all costs.

Pearl will use your default meta description (edit at Setup - Other - Website) unless a product or category has it’s own unique meta description. Make the description relevant to the page – it needs to be a fully formed sentence or two.

Meta descriptions should reflect the content of the page or product, do not be tempted to add targeted phrases to the meta description if they do not appear elsewhere in the page content or product description. Aim to keep meta descriptions to below 120 characters.

Pearl automatically rewrites the links to your pages on a regular basis, to improve the likelihood of a search query matching the page name. For example:
http://www.yoursite.com/category-name/sub-category/produce-name-here-p-123.html

A page/product on your website is specified as http://www.yourwebsite.com/index.php?p=product&products_id=1234. This is not ideal for search engines, so as you add products and pages Pearl will re-write these URLs and store the modified link in the database, for use throughout the site. The re-written URL will include relevant text, such as the parent category titles and the product name or the page title.

A category link will be re-written as http://www.yourwebsite.com/category-name-here-c-123.html where 123 is the category ID and “-c-“ identifies the link as a category. The generation of the link before the "-c-" section is determined by the parent categories and the page title of the current category. It is possible to put different words before the "-c-" section of the link and still land on the same page, however this is not recommended as it can cause search engines to store a duplicate page. Duplicate pages can cause confusion for your visitors and can also dilute the importance that a search engine places on your pages.

It is also possible to manipulate links to products by replacing the text before the "-p-" section of the product link. Again we would recommend against this as Pearl already uses a clever sytem to generate these links automatically, and you might introduce duplicate entries in to the search engines.

When you insert an image into a template or page, always enter something into the “Image Description” box.
Note: Product images are a special case.

Pearl will automatically generate a sitemap of your categories and products for improved indexing by search engines. This will exist at http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?p=sitemapxml

Google, for example, allows you to create a Google Webmaster Account to improve the chances of your site being indexed correctly. Similar offerings are available for MSN/Live/Bing at Bing Webmaster Tools and for Yahoo you can use the Site Explorer service.