How to Change Title Tags and Meta Descriptions in Squarespace
Squarespace is an excellent platform — but you need to go beyond the default settings to make sure that your site is sound in terms of SEO.
Squarespace is a versatile, easy-to-use, secure, and supported website building platform. The templates are exhaustively tested, and Squarespace provides lots of information to help you navigate content and media blocks in the editor.
Unfortunately, Squarespace isn’t great at helping you figure out exactly where to edit the title tag and meta description for the pages on your website. It’s important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that the title tag of each page describes what that page is about and that the meta description encourages searchers to click on your page instead of someone else’s.
The title and meta description will show up in search results like this:
Please Note:
“Home” is not an appropriate title tag, not even for your homepage. This is a good health and ability test to apply to any design or marketing agency you are considering partnering with! If their title tag is home, they probably don’t know how to optimize websites properly and your site will suffer as a result.
Editing the Title Tag
Squarespace defaults to making your title tag be the same as the name you gave the page for navigation purposes. This means that if you are calling your homepage “Home” so that it looks right in your navigation, by default, Home will become your title tag — and that’s no good at all!
Another example: the page title “About Us” will look great in your navigation, but “Meet Our Caring Vet Team in Seattle” would be a better title tag for SEO purposes.
Title tag optimization serves two purposes:
- Your site will rank higher if you have an optimized title tag. Include keywords, but don’t stuff it — write naturally!
- Your search results will be more interesting to searchers. What would you click on if you were searching for a vet: “About Us” or “Meet Our Caring Vet Team in Edmonton”?
It’s important for your navigation titles to make sense and look great. Those are the menu items that your customers and clients use to navigate around your site.
Squarespace Terminology:
Navigation Title — this is what appears on your site in your menu — this is where it is appropriate to use “About Us”.
Page Title — this will be your title tag — you need to put your SEO hat on for this field and use a more robust description like “Meet Our Caring Vet Team in Edmonton”.
Here’s a quick video (15 seconds!) that illustrates how it’s done:
Squarespace explains how to change your title tag here.
Editing the Meta Description
A great meta description outlines what is on your page, but also encourages the searcher to click on your result instead of someone else’s. Answer these questions: What does your page offer? Why should someone visit it? What will they get from it?
Keep in mind that Google might not always show your meta description — sometimes they’ll show snippets from your content instead.
What Google decides to show depends on what the search was for and how relevant your meta description is for that particular search. The meta description you wrote might show up for one search phrase, and then Google will make their own for another search phrase.
Unfortunately, you can’t control this. All you can do is write the best meta description that you can and then try to make peace with the fact that Google might think it knows what a searcher wants to see better than you do.
Write your meta description naturally. The words in the meta description don’t influence your search engine rankings (and haven’t since 2009), however if you write a great meta description and more people click on your site instead of the others that come up in search results, you will see your site’s rankings improve as a result. It’s worth the time to make your meta descriptions great!
Squarespace Terminology:
Description — this is where you will write your meta description — be sure to stay within 160 characters.
Here’s a quick video (10 seconds!) that illustrates how you can do this:
Squarespace also discusses how to change your meta description here.
Resources
- Learn more about search engine optimization and how title tags and meta descriptions fit into that with Moz’s guide to on-site SEO.
- Not sure where to start when it comes to writing meta descriptions? Start here.
- Here are some great tips for writing proper title tags. Remember: “Home” is not a good title tag.
- Read this article to get your site set up in Google Search Console. If you do this, you’ll get some data on what type of keywords bring visitors to your site and how often you come up in searches. However, Google Search Console data isn’t 100% accurate, but it’s the best we have access to at this time!
- Us! We’re here to help — get in touch. We write thousands of title tags and meta descriptions each year. For 99% of them, we focus on proper optimization and helping people get what they want and need when they are searching, but sometimes (on our own site) we don’t:
Originally published at kickpoint.ca on November 27, 2017.
