It begins with a basic understanding of how search engines use meta fields, particularly Google, since Google will provide you with most of your search engine referred traffic.

Take a look at this Google search result:

The title, Magento CSS Manager Extension | Mage Revolution™ is taken from the Title field of the product page, unless a value is used in the Meta Title field of the product in Magento. If so, Google would use the Meta Title value instead.

The URL of the page is, of course, the actual link to the product page. The use of canonical URLs is important, as it gives Google one link to the product, even though, as in this case, the product is also accessible by going to http://www.magerevolution.com/mr/magento-content-management-extensions/custom-css-manager. Without the use of canonical URLs, Google would see this as two different pages, each with the exact same content. Google is known to penalize sites that contain duplicate content by decreasing their rank position.

Finally, the description part of the listing comes first from any existing Meta Description field. If none exists, Google attempts to construct a meaningful description from the content of the page. By using a Meta Description field, you can control how the product is described in search engines.

We talked about the use of Product Fields Auto-Generation: the use of variables to automatically construct meta values for your products. While that is certainly a fast way of populating meta fields in products, it's also important to attend to meta fields for CMS pages and categories. There may also be certain products for which you want to insert special titles and descriptions to enhance their search engine presentation.

As you prepare your site for launch — and beyond launch — take time to address each important SEO feature in Magento: