Title, Description & Tagging Best Practices

You’ve spent time and energy on your design and you’re finally ready to sell it. There’s more you can do beyond just simply adding your product to the Zazzle marketplace. You want your product to be seen and purchased!

There are millions of products on Zazzle, so you’ll need to make your title, description and tags extra unique in order to stand out.


Your titles play a critical role when it comes to customers finding your products on Zazzle, and can also prove to be the make-or-break factor on whether your products will surface on Google’s search engine results pages. Therefore, you'll want to get into the habit of continually improving your titles with relevant keywords in order to improve your search page rankings (this is known as Search Engine Optimisation, or what is commonly referred to as 'SEO').

But first: what's a title?

Titles are a select group of keywords that thoroughly describe your design. Those keywords are what search algorithms use when determining if your product accurately matches what a customer is searching for. The best approach when choosing your title is to ask yourself:

“What keywords would a customer use when searching for a design like mine?"

This is usually a great start as you learn to create descriptive titles for your products. To really maximize the effectiveness of your title, be sure to use keywords that describe the design's theme, colour, specific design elements, and even who the product may be intended for.

Here are a few research tools to help you get started:

Once you've determined which keywords you would like to use, you'll need to start organising it in a way that would be most appealing to customers. Here are two great examples to help you get started:

Graphic-based designs:

[trait] [colour] [style] [content] [design type]
 example: "Vintage Navy and Pink Watercolor Floral"


Text-based designs:

[full/partial phrase] [trait] [content] [colour] [design type]
example: "No Bad Days Funny Quote with Yellow Text"


Lastly, be sure to be mindful of the 'quality' of your title. Quality refers to how unique your title is, as well as how relevant your keywords are to one another. In other words, if you reuse your titles across multiple products, or if you try to stuff a bunch of non-relevant keywords into your title (e.g., stuffing keywords like birthday/ wedding / rsvp / graduation into the same title), then search will most likely not surface your results because it will think your product is spam.

DO use descriptive words that accurately describe your design and the theme, such as colour or pattern. DON'T use a numbering scheme to distinguish similar designs.
DO use keywords customer would normally search for. DON'T include the Product type within the title.
DO use a unique title for each design. DON'T use less than 3 words (or less than 20 characters).
  DON'T only use artistic/abstract naming conventions.
  DON'T only use keywords such as “Create Your Own”, “Design Your Own”, “Your Text Here”.
  DON'T use the same title more than once or copy another design's title.
  DON'T use special characters or any obscure (unicode) such as  +  ^ }  ~



Your design descriptions are a great opportunity to let your customers know the story behind your art, and an opportunity to help your customers understand what makes your design unique and worthy of their purchase over the others. It's also a great space for you to detail any interesting use cases, as well as customisation tips, that you may have intended with your design.

One important thing to note is that search engines, such as Google, pay heavy attention to your design descriptions. So in order to ensure the best chances in surfacing within Google’s search results pages, you'll want to make sure that each of your products have unique and lengthy descriptions for Google to crawl. And don’t forget to include those relevant keywords in your descriptions, they will definitely help your chances of getting found.

DO use at least 3 to 5 sentences (~300 characters) when forming your design description. Try to tell your 'story' behind the design. DON'T leave your description empty or use phrases/ sentences that don't provide any additional information beyond your title.
DO use human readable sentences; write for your customers, not for search engines. DON'T employ keyword stuffing or use repetitive keywords(e.g., either using keywords too often, or using keywords not relevant to the design).
DO try to include related keywords that you’ve used in your title. DON'T use keywords not relevant to your design.
DO use a unique description for each design even if your design features the same character or similar subject. Unique content is key! DON'T repeat the same design description within your store or use copy from other stores.



Choosing the right tags is important for customers to find your design in the Zazzle marketplace. We suggest doing some research to identify descriptive and relevant tags for your products. Ask yourself: if you were to look for your design, what would be the most common search terms? Currently, there is a limit of ten total tags for your design. Individual tags are required to have a minimum of three characters, and phrases can have a maximum of five words.

The use of phrase tags are a great way to really maximise your chances in getting found in search, however, we would recommend building tags around phrases only when they match search terms customers use to find your design. As powerful of a tool that phrase tagging may be, the overuse of phrase tags by simply inserting random words in a tag will in fact negatively impact the potency of your metadata, as using tags that having nothing to do with your design would appear as irrelevant to our search algorithm and impact your product ranking.

If you don’t consider yourself an expert on tagging and search yet, don’t worry! Here are some tips on how you can maximise the potential of your tags and get some eyes on your work:


DO build tags around phrases when it makes sense and give each phrase a maximum of five words. DON'T use product types as tags, unless they are relevant to your design.
DO use keywords that are descriptive and specific to your design.

DON'T use tags or keywords that are irrelevant and have nothing to do with your design.

DO repeat keywords in your title and use other related keywords that users may use to find the design. DON'T use plural variations of keywords or employ keyword stuffing.
DO use research tools to see what keywords others are using for similar products (e.g., Google Trends, Google Search, etc.). DON'T repeat keywords across multiple tags.
DO double check your tags before publishing a product to avoid misspellings and mistakes.

DON'T use 'custom' or 'personalised' (or any other keywords that can apply to most products in our marketplace) as keywords.

(Additional words not to use are: gear, custom, create, gifts,  presents, gift idea, products, merchandise, personalize, personalized, personalizable, customize, customized, customizable, custom made, customise, customisable, customised, made to order,  make your own, personal, personalised, personalise, personalisable.)