Setting product meta titles and SEO best practise

[chartermyyacht]

Hi. New to Magento so bear with me..

Can someone just answer one question for me. My understanding is that meta titles on product pages have to be unique? My site is a yacht charter website.  I was thinking...  

'Yacht charter - Rent a Motor Yacht - Boat name - Italy '-  as an example.  If I have completed the ‘Title suffix’ in the HTML head section in ‘Design’ with  '- chartermyyacht'  .  Will magento automatically add ‘- chartermyyacht’  to the end of the meta title.  Do I need to add the ‘-‘ or is it added by default.     Trust that makes sense.

Similarly, when in ‘Product pages’ ‘ images’, when completing the ‘label’ for an image, how much detail to I have to give in order to improve SEO rankings.  Do the product image labels have to be unique also?

Do I need a a default description in HTML head?  Some websites say I need it for my home page, others say it will get confused with other meta titles and descriptions?

When putting an alt tag on an image in my cms pages, can I just write the text or do I have to put alt=

Thanks all.  Website soon to launch so I’m just checking I’m set up for SEO best practise

[Pronto]

Nope, they don't have to be unique, it's what Google shows as a title on their search results. You can have several pages with same title.

Image labels doesn't have to be unique either, but it would be great if they contain at least couple of relevant keywords.

[MageWorxTeam · Accepted solution]

@chartermyyacht

All that you include into the title suffix will be displayed after the empty space right after the main contents. I mean, you should include the "-" symbol.

Settings: https://www.gyazo.com/466d460cca7ec3edf1eaa91c2746be38
The results (before): https://www.gyazo.com/d0dba618905d84b8a22ba368dbc376e4
The results (after): https://www.gyazo.com/f2a562ba5385ccb09acfb74c14461d5a

>>Similarly, when in ‘Product pages’ ‘ images’, when completing the ‘label’ for an image,
>>how much detail to I have to give in order to improve SEO rankings.
>> Do the product image labels have to be unique also?

We'd recommend adding unique images' title and alt tags.
The meaning of Alt tag is "An HTML attribute specified in the IMG tag to provide alternate text when an image on a Web page cannot be displayed."
So, different images on a page should have different Title and Alt tags.
To make them SEO-ed, just add your page's keywords in these tags.

>>Do I need a a default description in HTML head?
>>Some websites say I need it for my home page,
>>others say it will get confused with other meta titles and descriptions?

If you are referring to Meta Description tag, all pages should have unique and informative descriptions.

>> When putting an alt tag on an image in my cms pages, can I just write the text or do I have to put alt=

You just add tag content (i.e. what will be added to the tag), so no need to add "alt=".

Hope it helps!

[chartermyyacht]

Thanks for the response.  Very much appreciated after googling and getting miss-information.  

There was one thing that I may not have been clear on.

In system > config > design > HTML Head.  Do I need to put a default description. Some say leave blank, others say to put my key strap line e.g.  

Book a holiday with a skipper or charter a yacht from professional companies worldwide - DIRECT!

Also, do I need to put anything in the ‘default keywords’ section

[Amasty]

Hello @chartermyyacht

Meta descriptions should be unique across your site (just like title tags), so it's better to leave the default meta description field blank and write original meta descriptions for each site page. If it seems too hard, you can use Meta Tags Templates extension to generate unique meta data for your site.

As for meta keywords, I would not bother too much about them as they are not longer counted by Google