Remember: Website SEO Isn’t Magic. It’s Structure.

About this Squarespace video tutorial

Website SEO isn't complicated, it's just misunderstood. With a few easy, consistent tips, you can optimize your website for search engines over times, building better website habits to get your business in front of the people who are looking for it.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:44 – What I’m Seeing (Six Things To Do Today For SEO)
14:30 – What I’m Doing
16:02 – What To Try on Squarespace Right Now

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In my opinion, SEO isn’t complicated, it’s just misunderstood. I think it’s such a buzzword an people that don’t understand it are often oversold on it like it’s some mysterious thing. That’s not really true. It’s a series of strategies, all of which can be implemented like how an expert would.

I’m going to tell you what those things are so you can do that on your own website, breaking down what actually matters, what doesn’t, and what I’ve been doing on my own website. Part of SEO is being present with what’s actually changing, so we’ll talk about that as well. So, here’s to making SEO approachable and fun and helping you find success through your website with SEO.

Six Things To Do Today For SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, so what we’re talking about is how to optimize your website for search engines to show you in search results. SEO applies not just to your website, it applies to YouTube, Instagram, and many other social media platforms. It’s more than just a website tool, it applies for any content if you want to come up in search.

It’s why when people always ask ‘Can you do my SEO?’ it’s the wrong question. I build SEO into my websites with Designing The Row, but I do not go in and add SEO to a site after the fact. It’s content strategy, something embedded into your files. There’s no magic thing that gives your website SEO. You’re not missing anything, there are just improvements you can make today as you expand your website.

So here are the six things you can focus on today to improve your SEO.

1. File Names

When you have pictures on your site, if they were taken by a professional photographer, they’re probably all going to be named something like IMG1234YourInitials. Like most people, you probably just dragged these images into your website without thinking. Before you do that, you need to rename all of the files. These names are a big part of how Google reads these photos and sends them to the right searches.

I recommend putting hyphens in between the words on the file names, by the way, because that’s how Google best handles image titles.

(Extra tip: If the photos are 10mb each or something similar, that’ll be too big for your website and affect your site’s performance and SEO. Reduce the size of those photos to be about >1mb or so to optimize web performance. You can do this on a Mac by opening the image in Preview, and export the file as a jpeg with a smaller size)

2. Don’t Ignore Alt Tag Placement

The alt tag is how you can communicate what the image is about beyond just the file name. It’s your opportunity to be far more descriptive with what’s in the image, and is a valuable tool for visitors on your site that may be vision impaired or have some other need for alt tags on an accessibility level.

Be more descriptive than you think you’d need to, feel free to write a long sentence describing exactly what the image is.

3. Favicon

One of the big tells that someone has DIY’d their own website is if their favicon, that small icon in the tab at the top of the browser, is still the default one from whatever web building software they use. For Squarespace, it’s a black square icon. Use the same principles as with other images for your favicon, keeping the size small and the name descriptive.

4. Text - Titles

Remember: Google can’t read your mind. To help Google understand what you’re trying to say, you need to structure your text in a way it understands. For page titles, one word-long titles don’t have enough information to tell Google everything it needs to know. For reference, my About page would be called ‘About Designing The Row’.

Your page title can be different from what shows up in your navigation, so take advantage of that disparity and get the most out of your page title since it won’t clutter up other areas of your site.

5. Text - Headers

For headers, I so often see people use header tags for sizing and designing text, which is…not what they are there for. Header texts are designed to guide search engines to the most important text on the page. Each page should only have one Header 1 (H1) tag, and you can’t skip header titles, so if you have an H1 and an H3 tag on your site, you also need an H2 tag so the hierarchy of headers makes sense.

6. Meta Descriptions

If you search for Designing The Row, when my homepage comes up, you’ll see a small couple of sentences in Google describing my business and website. Each page can have their own meta description. If you don’t have one, your website will pull the default meta description for the whole site. If you don’t have one of those, Google shows the first piece of text on the page it can find for the meta description, which is disastrous.

If nothing else, write one meta description for your site as a whole that can work for the entire site with your keywords. If you’d like to test your new meta description the same way I do, the tool at SEObility.com is a great resource.

I’d love for you to do this for every page, but if you only have time to do the one right now, that is okay.

What I’m Doing

What I’m focused on doing right now is separating my service pages into two different ones because my business is evolving and I’ve been offering full creation of sites as well as refreshes on existing sites. What I don’t want is for someone to look up keywords that connect to the services I offer and only see the one page, because the two offerings are designed to attract very different audiences.

I’m writing page content and SEO information for each of these pages to make sure I’m in control not only of what is on my site, but what people are seeing in the process to get to my site.

What To Try on Squarespace Right Now

The SEO checker tool that Squarespace recently added can analyze your site and give you concrete recommendations as to what needs to be updated and offer suggestions as to the SEO text you could add.

It’s a very helpful tool that attacks a problem I’ve even had with my own site, so click here for a video where I took an existing client site and helped walk them through the process of using this tool.

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*Affiliate disclaimer: Some links may be affiliate links at no extra cost to you.

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