Squarespace Tips: The Importance of Categories & Tags

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. Meghan here with the busy bee, I'm accustomed Squarespace designer, graphic designer and lover of all snacks living in Champagne, Illinois. In this course, we're gonna tackle everything you need to know about squares, faces, categories and text, like the importance of them. What the differences between the two and all of the different ways you can use them on the platform. The key topics will cover include the difference between categories and tags, the importance of them restrictions and guides that score space has set up for these categories and tags. How to add your categories and tags into your site. And then finally, how to use these categories in tax with block, coasts, events, products and galleries. So pull up your squarespace site and let's dive right in. 2. What's the Difference?: So let's just dive in. The first thing I want to do is really talk about the difference between categories and Tex , because often time it's thrown around like added categories and tags, especially with block posts. Right. But what's the actual difference? So in general, categories are used to organize your content by subject or type. So really, there the overarching themes of what the content is. So, for example, on my blawg, my content is, um, my categories are squarespace design, business freebies and lifestyle. So those are the themes off my blog's, so you want to be more selective with ease. This is kind of my rule of thumb. I like to stick between five and seven categories. There isn't any, like s e o reason behind this or anything like that. It just hopes. Keep the content nice and organized and clean for the visitors that are landing on your site. So, in contrast, tags in general are used based on keywords. What the subject matter anything related to the content you're tagging is about. So because of that, you could be more liberal with ease. So going back to the block example, let's say that I am posting a blogged all about best squarespace websites for copywriters like examples of these websites. So I have a whole list of all the different websites or images or whatever, added all the content. The category I pick would be squarespace, since that's what it's about and then the tags are all about what that actual post is. So I would write in copyrighting websites, copyrighting squarespace websites, squarespace copyrighting websites. You kind of get the gist and we'll go over some of the guidelines that squarespace gives you in regards to, um, you're adding in categories and tags, but there are no restrictions on the amount of tags that you use so without stuffing your posts with thousands of tags, you can be pretty liberal with them. Um, and just kind of let your imagination go. As long is, it is applicable to the actual content. 3. The Importance, Restrictions and Guides: So, really, the importance of categories and tags is that they keep like I mentioned before, they keep your content organized and structured for later use in other places, like adding it in blood posts like I mentioned, but also filtering products linking to particular content within a button. And again I'll go through all the different. Or, I should say, all the most common ways that we use them within square space so that you get a good idea of all the different ways that you can use them within the platform to kind of build out your site in a more organized and structured way. And in addition, adding categories is a necessary step to utilize scores, faces new related products. Feature was actually necessary stuff to do it before they had the feature. But now even more so. A few months ago, Squarespace launched the related products feature where you can select um to show related products. If you sell products in your shop, um, within the same category, so you have to actually add in categories in order to utilize that. So before I go into how you actually set these up in all the different areas on squarespace that you can use categories and tags. I just want to point out some of the restrictions and guides that Squarespace has four categories and tags, so the first is that categories have to be 25 characters or fewer, so you don't want to ramble on and on about them. And again, you want them to be brief anyways, because you want your visitors to haven't really quick idea of what your content is about and again. Categories are the overarching themes of your content, so keep them a 25 characters or fewer, and tags must be 80 characters or fewer. So you have a little bit more leeway within what? How many characters they're using for the tags. But again, you don't want tohave sentences for your tags. You want to split those texts up into bite size, um, keywords. Both tags and categories are case sensitive, so this means if I am tagging my block post copyrighting websites, I would do copyrighting websites all lower case and then if I wanted to, I could capitalize the sea and copyrighting in the W in websites, Um, because their case sensitive, so not a lot of people know this. It can feel kind of repetitive, but I'll show you kind of a trick in a little bit on how to add in a lot of tags at one time, especially if AH lot of your tags are similar within block posts. Or if you have different themes within your block posts that you know you're going to have similar tags than you would add in specific ones later, I'll show you how to do that. Both categories and tags will appear in alphabetical order. So if you do decide to show these categories and tags, I'm just gonna keep using the block our blogger example. But especially for using categories on your block, I would definitely recommend making sure that they appear on your site, but they will. If you do have them appear within the style styling section, they will appear in alphabetical order. And then you can also show all of your tags within block posts as well. So, um, you can, if you do decide to showcase those, those will appear in alphabetical order and then finally, categories are managed per collection page, not across multiple pages or your entire site, so you can have different categories for different collections such as long and product pages, which is great. So I'm actually going Teoh show you, um, on my site, the difference in my categories between my blawg and my shop. Just so you have a little idea. So let's jump over there. Okay, So here is my blawg. And if I scroll down on the right hand side and I designed the sidebar, um, so that's why they're not enough about Florida. It's all of with custom, CSS, but, um, my categories for my block, our business, squarespace design, real life and free stuff. And then, alternately, if you go to shop and what's that? Loads. I have my categories on the left. Here. I have freebies, website design, marketing and social. So you see that you can have different categories for different portions of your site. 4. Adding Categories & Tags to Your Website: All right, so let's talk about adding categories and tags actually into your squarespace site. So I pulled up the back end of my site and we're gonna work within my blawg for this example. But just keep in mind, you can use this exact same process for events, galleries, albums and products. But when you have a block post that either you have posted already, but preferably you'd like to do this before you posted it. I'm just gonna pull one up that I've recently posted. Um, you'll have this tags and categories section at the very bottom of the pop up. So here with categories. If you press the plus sign, you can see all of the categories that you've added in before, or you can create anyone and then the Samos for tags. So if I click on that, I can add a multitude of tags and you see here in like a light gray. It says, tags comma separated. And here's where that little tip comes in. So if you have are your using like a string of tags for a lot of your block posts, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I can't take all of these in. It's really hard to see them when you type them in in this way, but you can do is actually it create like a Google doc or notes. If you know, ever note or whatever you use and type in all of the tags that you use for this type of post and then just comma separate them. What you can actually do is just copy all of those tags. Click this button and paste them in, making sure that you separate them with commas and hit Enter and it'll add them all in, which saves a ton of time like a ton of time. 5. Using Categories & Tags on Your Website: all right. And before I wrap this up, I just want to walk you guys through how to use categories and tags with blonde coasts, events, products and galleries, which I would consider the most widely used ones on squarespace again hopping back over to the back end of my site. I just have a blank page when I'm calling testing page on here. So I just want to show you we're gonna add a content black. Um, and the 1st 1 I want to show you is blog's, which is, I think, the most widely used one. Um ah, block for, um, utilizing your categories in tech. So I'm gonna hit content black. I'm gonna just do Let's just do grid here, summary block grid. And then I'm gonna select for the content blawg. And then I go to lay out here and you know, we don't have toe Adan, you don't have to worry about any of this right now because we're not actually talking about the design portion of it. But if we go over to display, here's where you can see we can filter by category. So if I wanted to just show freebies if I start typing in free. You can see that it will pull free stuff, which is one of my categories. And it'll Onley pull in my free items or I can filter by tag, which so clean off I wanted to do something like square space. Um, you can see all of my different squarespace Texel. It's I do squarespace tutorial. It only pulls those, um and that works for all of the content. Summary blocks. So that is how you use it for block posts. Let me show you how you use it for products, which is the exact same way. So it's gonna be a summary block again. I'm gonna hit grid and I'm going to hit shop instead of, um ah, blawg. And if I go over to display here is where I can search for a particular category. So if I do, let's say, um, let's two free download And to get rid of this tag in here because I don't have a, um I don't want to filter Bible category and tag. It will just pull in all of my free products. I can also type in something like marketing, and it'll pull in any of my marketing, marketing categorized products. So adding in an event summary is literally the exact same process. Almost skip over that for this training. But I do want to go over adding gallery kind of summaries using categories and Tex. So we're gonna go over to the plus sign here, and normally what you'd think to do would be to click on one of the gallery blocks. Let's just act like grid. I created a new gallery just with three photos that I had in my downloads folder. Um, so if I head over to design, you can see I don't have anywhere to filter. So we actually want to do is instead of using a gallery block, we're going to go back to our old faithful summary black here. So I'm gonna hit grid one more time, and you can see if you have these gallery, um, that you can pull from your existing galleries right here. So if I go to new gallery, which is what I had before and again, you can change the display of this. If you wanted to show a squares, you don't want the date on their anything like that, you could always remove it. But if we head over to display again, you can filter by category or tag. So, um, I added in test cad kgo gory little type of there. And then it filtered just the two photos that I had added that to. 6. Class Project: All right, everyone, It's class project time and this one is super simple. All you'll need to do is organize a page on your score space website using your new categories and texts, so you'll want to share your squarespace page or just take a screenshot of it and upload that image along with your website URL so that other students can see your new organization skills. And don't forget you guys leave feedback on other students work so we can all help and encourage one another as best as we can on organizing our squarespace websites with these new categories and tags. 7. Final Words: and that wraps up our training all about categories and tags. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at Meghan at the busy bee or shoot me a message at my website, which is www dot the busy Doctor. Eat. Thanks so much, guys.