How to Edit Title Tags for Small Business SEO in Squarespace

Video Transcription (Video Below):

Today I am going to do a quick and easy video to show how to edit some of the key meta tags on Squarespace and another quick and basic solution to help you with Squarespace websites. I know a lot of small businesses start out with some of the tools like Weebly and Squarespace before they may move on to more advanced things or, in my opinion, a little better user experiences in WordPress, but Squarespace is often a good place to start out and it’s very important to get your meta tags straight.

Why Edit Title Tags for SEO and What Are They?

So I just want to give you a quick tour of how to do that. So we’re going to start out. I have an online hunger charity for New Jersey that I helped support and we’re just going to look really quickly at how to do a title tag edit and explain what those are. So just really quick title tags are very important for SEO still. Although sometimes you hear information that they’re not the title tag is basically a tag on the page and it’s also what typically shows up in the search results. So a real quick example here for title tag for some of the pages on my own website. If you Google “secret formula for small business SEO success”, you see some of these websites that show up a couple of these are my site and the click the link that you click on in the search results. That’s the title tag for the page. Now the importance of the title tag is that Google kind of looks at it as I always tell people, the tab at the top of a folder in a filing cabinet. If you’re thinking old school and old filing cabinets. So the words that are in that title tag are important to get you in the discussion or into the process of showing up for specific searches. Now, there are some rules around title tags and I will link to an old post I have on helping your SEO by editing title tags in my blog.

It’s on this, which will include this video, so you can check there but there are rules such as you want to try to keep it under 60 characters. Although that’s not a hard rule. The search engines are going to only show so many characters. So you want to put the important stuff first. So people actually see it and it entices a click now.

Actually Editing Title Tags in Squarespace for Small Business SEO Targeting

Let’s get down to the actual work here. So this is the hunger charity that I talked about and this is the mission page. So just so you understand the title tag; the only place you see it other than the search results is in the little tab at the top of your browser when you’re on desktop. It’ll actually spell out what your title tag is. On this page – this is the mission page for the Hunger charity. It’s just formulaic and a lot of websites will formulaically add a title tag unless you edit it. So what I’m telling you is you should probably edit it. So if you are a local business targeting a local Town something like that you want to have the geography or targeting in there and if you have a number of services. For example, a dentist may have an implant service versus cleaning versus whitening. All those individual pages should have what the services in the title tag along with the geographic market that you’re targeting and you can be a little creative to again, you’re trying to entice a click.

So if you look on the back end of Squarespace, this is what it kind of looks like when you’re logged in from the back end to make edits to the page, but beyond making edits to the page you want to go and look at your pages.

Here we’re going to see our mission page and a little dial pops up to go to the settings. Now if you’re working on Weebly or any of these other tools, there are also going to have similar options here to help edit the SEO title tag. So sometimes you have to play around in there to find it. In this particular case, we’re working with Squarespace. So it’ll be easier if you’re working with Squarespace to see exactly how it works. So if you click here it’s going to take you to the page settings. Inside the page setting is SEO. So as we can see and as I mentioned, there’s a formula that automatically creates a title tag because you have to have a title tag, but if you want to change it, which I recommend you do, you can edit the SEO title here where it says optional. So instead of just saying our mission – NJ online hunger Charities, which is the formula because of the title of the website being NJ hunger Charities, we are going to switch it to something like “how Charities” and with Squarespace, it’ll actually show you what it’s going to look like an example of it in the search results. So there’s where you put that now the description is a little more of a gray area. So the description is the wording that shows up in the search results.

So on the search results, you see text underneath the link and that’s supposed to be the description. The one thing here is that it always isn’t chosen by Google. Google will sometimes add their own description from the content on the page. But still, it can be a good idea to add a description. I usually tell people, though Squarespace gives you four hundred characters, I usually tell people to go for probably around a hundred fifty is about as much as you’re going to say try to make your case in that space so we may show something like “this website provides links contact information for charities.”

You can play around with it a little bit, but that will actually help you make some changes. Once you have those changes in there. You can go back and then if you want to check that it worked. Well, of course, you want to save it. If you want to check that it worked. You can go back to your actual page on the front end and refresh it and you’ll see that “our mission” that used to be there in the title tag is now replaced by the title tag that we change to so that’s the basics of changing of the title tag in Squarespace.

Bonus: Inserting Google Analytics Tracking Code on Squarespace

Another quick thing that you can do and some people ask me about this a little bit of bonus information is you can go back a level here. People often wonder where they put their Google analytics code when they’re getting the website set up. Oops.

• Well, you go into your website as we just were.

I’ve got a slow connection here. So I should have something entertaining to say while we’re waiting for things to load.

• Then you go to settings.
• Then you go to Advanced.
• Inside Advanced, go to the things that says code injection.

If you click on there, there’s a header and Google will tell you in their instructions. If you go to analytics.google.com, which is another tutorial entirely it will give you instructions to place a certain code in the header on your website so it’s on every page. This is basically where you put it. You just copy that code and you paste it in here and that way you’ll get your Google Analytics set up on your site. So anyway, I hope this was really helpful for you as you get your website on Squarespace. It’s really important to jump on this stuff early to help your pages show up for the things you want them to show up for and I’m glad to be of service. We’ve been helping small businesses succeed with SEO for nearly 15 years, and we’re always here when you need us to fill in the gaps. So thanks so much and give a call if you need help.