Text Page Titles

As we discussed earlier, a Yahoo! store always creates an image for the name of the item or section. Although a Yahoo! store also generates an "alt text" for these images, pictures are no match for text when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Although the Yahoo! Store Editor does not provide you with any way to show item and section names as text (instead of automatically generated images), it is quite easy to tweak a template to give yourself this feature.

The key is the template called head (or your copy of it, that is.) This template is used to create the heading for any item or section page (it's also used by the info and privacy policy pages). Before modifying this template, create a new template called show-title. We use this template to display the name of the page in text. show-title is listed here:

Show-title (title) FONT size 3      color @display-text-color       face @text-font    TEXT-STYLE :bold      FOR-EACH variable line               sequence LINES title        TEXT line        LINEBREAK LINEBREAK 

Feel free to modify this template to suit your needs. The example uses text size 3 for the heading here; the same color is set for the display title (the graphic titles are replaced here). When you have this template, bring up your copy of the template called head. In this template, locate the following expression (you will find it in three places):

IMAGE source textim       alt text 

When you have located these expressions, replace them with the following:

CALL :show-title       text 

This does the trick. The template show-title preserves line breaks you might have in the headline field just like the generated graphical headings would. However, whereas the generated graphic headings don't let you use any HTML tags in the name or headline parameters, show-title has no such problems because it deals with text. When you have these modifications in place, for example, you can include a trademark sign next to a trademark by entering this into the headline field:

My Trademarked Item<sup><small>TM</small></sup> 

If you tried doing the same without these template changes, you would end up with something like this on your page:

My Trademarked ItemTM  

You can do other things, including changing the color of certain words in the page heading by simply including the <font color=...>...</font> tags in the headlines field (you should never include HTML tags in the name field. name is used as the title tag of the page and is also used by Yahoo! shopping's search engine.)

Being able to format those headlines any way you want is certainly a plus, but the most you can gain from not having graphical headlines is better search engine placement. Remember, search engines can't see images, but they can read text. In fact, that's all they do.