Beginner’s Guide to Squarespace SEO (PART THREE)

Getting your website found on Google search results is one of the biggest goals of website owners. Whether your site is built on Wordpress, Shopify or Squarespace, good SEO (search engine optimization) strategies are key to your site showing up on the first page of Google for keywords specific to your business.

There is a checklist of SEO tasks that I teach my website design clients that they must go through every time they update their blog or add new pages to their website. Here are 22 of them. Why 22? Well, I was born on the 22nd but that’s not why we have 22 steps. It just happens to be 22 items for this Beginner’s Guide.

Go here for Part One (1-8)
Go here for Part Two (9-16)
You are reading Part Three (17-22)

22 SEO Tips for Optimizing Your Squarespace Website

I call this a Beginner’s Guide because these really are the first steps to get your site set-up for SEO. There’s always tons you can do but if you do these 22 things, you will be off to a great start. Some are to one-off steps, while others can become part of your SEO checklist for whenever you upload a blog or add a new page to your site.

Optimize Your Pages

18. Name Your Pages
When you create a new page in Squarespace, it automatically gets the name “New-Page”. Make it a habit to immediately name your new page according to its content. So call it “About” or “Work with me” instead of leaving it at the auto-generated name title. This is important not only for you, to know what your pages are, but also for SEO as your pages make more sense and can drive traffic according to what they are searching.

19. Have Unique Page Descriptions
Having the same page descriptions across all of your pages is not going to help you. Craft bespoke descriptions for each page adding relevant keyword descriptors without overly repeating them. You can click on the wheel icon next to each page and click over to SEO where you can now add descriptions and see how they will appear in search results.

20. Have a custom 404 Error Page
There are always broken links on websites - that’s the natural wear and tear of running a website - what is known as “link rotting”. You can fix those broken links periodically, and I have created a separate video showing you how to find and fix broken links. But when someone does click a link that is broken, a 404 Error page will show up. Make sure that you create a customized 404 Error Page that keeps the conversation going further instead of the user-experience being a dead end. I will make a video on this for you to be released on Sept 26th that will show you just how to do this.

Do this periodically

21. Remove Broken Links
As I mentioned in point # 20, cleaning up your site periodically to make sure there aren’t broken links is a good practice. Think of it your website Spring Cleaning that you really can do anytime of the year. Here’s the video showing you some free tools to do this easily.

22. Get many many backlinks from authority websites
Backlinks are still important for Google Search results. But the quality of backlinks is even more important than the quantity. If your site is linked with high authority websites that are reliable and trustworthy, then that’s a good quality backlink. Showing up in podcasts or writing guest posts or being interviewed on an authority site are some good ways to get quality backlinks.

23. Learn about new SEO requirements
Things are constantly changing and the tech world is no different. Make it your goal to keep an open mind and learn about new SEO requirements as new developments in technology take effect. One way to do that is to go to experts who make it their mission to bring these new changes to you and keep you up-to-date as a result.

My biggest lesson ⎯ Create a website with the end-user & user-experience in mind

In summary: It’s interesting, you’ll find that whenever you do something on your site to optimize SEO/Search Engine results, the same actions are also helping your visitor in some way. So you can see the direct correlation of making your site really work for your site visitor and your site getting found higher in search results. Make that your focus and you will naturally help your site get new and regular traffic.

Your Turn:

What do you think of the message in this blog article? Do you have a course created or are you planning on one? If so, let me know in the comments what your course is all about/will be about. Chime in! I’d love to hear from you!

~ Sophia