adjusting meta description and meta title lenght

[welshop.com]

Ola!

I have recently felt the full force of google's panda update will a serious drop in ranking and traffic - and now the same thing is happening on Bing & Yahoo.
One major issue as detailed in Bing's webmaster tools is the length of the meta description and meta title tags. (meta keywords now being obsolete.)

I am presently using zencart 1.3.9h and would like to know how do I amend the size of the meta description & meta title that is automatically generated in by Zen Cart.

In addition does anyone know if 1.5 has this capability built in? If so I'll seriously consider upgrading as this is becoming something of an issue.

Cheers
Brinley

[welshop.com]

oops! One more thing
Anyone know how to add alt tags to attribute images or whether this facility is built in to 1.5?

[schoolboy]

Certainly for Google, the META HEADERS are becoming less and less important. With the exception of the <title> tag, all the others are not really as influential for "seo" as they used to be.

Google now ranks sites on the quality of the total user experience, and certainly it helps is the HTML validates (as this can influence the "user experience").

Google looks at the WHOLE SITE, so if there are parts of your site that are poor, it will penalise the WHOLE SITE - not just the "poor pages".

Other factors influencing the "user experience" include:

* link hierarchy and logic (fortunately, zencart's linking hierarchy is inherently good, but watch for bad/illogical linking to things like ez-pages)
* load speed. The faster the better, so optimise images, and avoid fancy trinkets like detailed image sliders, flash carousels, videos, etc that take long to load up
* good, logical and relevant page content. Make sure the HTML to TEXT ratio is above 15%.
* fewer, but good quality backlinks that are on sites that are RELEVANT to your site.
* Topical content... keep your content fresh. Have help and advice pages. If you sell foods, then have a section on recipes, cooking ideas, diet, nutrition, etc.
* Genuine customer testimonials - usually served up on 3rd-party testimonial sites.

[welshop.com]

Yeah! Page speeed has been optimised, content rewritten and not over optimised with keyword density reduced to under 5%, backlinks are ok but working on establishing more - customer testimonials another area soon to be resolved.

With regards to meta description length Zen Cart 1.3.9 concantenates product pages to around 400 characters which is no longer acceptable as it should sit under 150 char, which is what I would like to amend by adapting the code. Any ideas where to look to change this setting?