E-Commerce website, items meta tag Help!!

Hi BHW,

First time I work on an onsite SEO for an E-commerce website. My question is, Beisdes the meta tags for each page, there is a section in the backend to add met tags for each single item that is being sold. There could be easly over 100 items, so Do I have to fill in those ? What do you guys do on your end and what is recommended in this case?

Many Thanks

Meta Tags/Descriptions make no difference in Google rankings. I have a ecommerce store that has 2k categories and 500 products, make a template and use notepad to replace the keywords and repeat, that's the fastest way, even faster with a .csv import/export feature. Unless your plugin/seo tool allows smarty code the import/export .csv is the fastest method.

That's true that don't make much difference, but Why would Magento have meta tags for each single product? What's their purpose...
Another question, how your pages would rank, usually e-commerce websites don't have much content, I could wrong too

Thanks

It isn't necessary to fill them out. But if you do it will help out a little in searching exact product.

Its not true. Meta tags DO have big importance and you should definetly take time and fill in each in a unique way. Description is not directly affecting your rankings, but have huge impact in your click thru rates from google result pages. If you leave them blank, google just use anything on your site... and it could be real crap. Same as keywords, they dont have impact on google, but in bing they DO have little significance. (And you dont know when google starts to take them seriously again. ) So dont be lazy and fill in everything you need to outcompete your competition. Oh and dont forget to have unique title in every product page starting with the name of your product to catch relevant longtails.