Shopify lets you edit SEO elements directly in the admin without touching code for most basic optimizations. For products and collections, open any item, scroll to the bottom, and click 'Edit website SEO' under the search engine listing preview. You'll see fields for page title (title tag), meta description, and URL handle. The title should be 50–60 characters and include your target keyword. Meta descriptions work best at 140–155 characters with a clear value proposition. URL handles should be short, keyword-rich, and hyphen-separated—change these before publishing because redirects add overhead later. For homepage and other pages, go to Online Store > Preferences for the homepage title and description, or navigate to Pages and edit individual entries the same way. Blog posts follow the same pattern under the Blog Posts section. Shopify auto-generates title tags by appending your store name, so if your product is named 'Leather Wallet' and your store is 'Ottawa Goods', the default becomes 'Leather Wallet | Ottawa Goods'. You can override this in the SEO section. Beyond the basics, you need theme edits or apps for advanced work. Schema markup for products is built-in but limited—if you want FAQ schema or breadcrumb customization, you'll edit your theme's Liquid files or install an app. Alt text for images is set individually by clicking each image in the product editor, critical for image search and accessibility. Canonical tags are auto-managed but sometimes need manual fixes for duplicate content issues, which requires theme code access. Common traps: Shopify forces /products/, /collections/, and /pages/ in URLs by default, which isn't ideal but hard to remove without apps or custom development. Also, the platform creates a /collections/all page that indexes everything—block it in robots.txt or via meta noindex if it cannibalizes your category pages. At Ottawa SEO, we typically run a Screaming Frog audit first to catch missing descriptions, duplicate titles, and orphaned pages before making edits, because Shopify stores often have 200+ auto-generated URLs from variants and filtered views.