When optimizing your Squarespace website for SEO, it's important to follow certain steps to ensure search engines can find it. These steps include submitting a sitemap, activating an SSL certificate, customizing title tags, optimizing URLs, adding alt text to images, etc. Only then will you be ready to plan and publish valuable content that will help your audience.
Here’s how to optimize your Squarespace website for SEO.
Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
To get your website indexed by Google, you need to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Luckily, Squarespace can automatically connect your website to your Google Search Console account.
To do this, go to Analytics from your Squarespace home menu. From there[キーワードを検索]and in the panel's pop-up window[接続]Click . This will prompt you to log into your Google account to allow Squarespace to connect to your site. Wait up to 72 hours for your website to become discoverable by Google.
Connect your website to Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to track visitors to your site. Although it doesn't directly impact your SEO, it's important for making informed decisions about your website's performance.
To connect your Squarespace website to Google Analytics, first create an Analytics account and generate a unique tracking code called a Measurement ID. From there, open your Squarespace developer tools panel and[外部 API キー]Click and enter the measurement ID.
Check the status of your SSL certificate
Squarespace offers free SSL certificates for your Squarespace domain, connected third-party domains, subdomains, and built-in domains. If you have any of these domains, Squarespace will automatically activate your SSL certificate.
However, you can check if SSL is active by opening your Squarespace domain panel and checking if an SSL certificate has been issued. Then open the SSL panel and verify that SSL is active. For more complex security needs, you can manually select your SSL settings by opening the SSL panel and adjusting the settings in Security Settings.
Customizing your page title tags
Every page has an editable title tag, which represents the SEO title and meta description that will appear in search results. Squarespace generates these automatically for each page or post, but you can manually update them to change how they appear in search results.
Each page or post has its own SEO tab where you can edit the title and meta description, as well as preview how it will appear in search results.
Create a custom 404 page
A 404 error is a code that indicates that a page on your website is no longer available. This can happen if you remove a page and don't redirect the old URL to another location. This is called a broken link. Broken links create a poor user experience and can have a negative impact on your overall SEO.
Squarespace provides you with an automatic 404 page, but you can customize it to give your website visitors a great user experience that matches your brand and lets them navigate elsewhere. To create a custom 404 page, create a new page in Squarespace and click[リンクされていません]section. Then, view your current 404 page and select the new one.
Optimize your URLs
As you create pages and posts on your Squarespace site, it's important to optimize each URL by adding your desired keyword to the slug, which is the string of characters after your domain name, such as “www.yourwebsite.com/slug-goes-here.”
To optimize your URLs in Squarespace, go to your home menu[ページ]click the gear icon to open the page settings, and enter the page keyword in the URL slug field.[保存]Click.
Add alt text to images
In addition to adding keywords to the URL of each of your pages, you should also add relevant keywords to the alt text section of each image that you add to your website. This helps search engines like Google understand the content of your images, making your website more discoverable.
Go to Squarespace's image block editor.[コンテンツ]Click the tab: Alternative text for images and enter your alternative text in the field. We recommend adding the main keywords of the page on which the image is located to help search engines understand the content better.
Use keywords in your headlines and meta descriptions
It's also important to add your target keywords to the headlines and meta descriptions of your pages and posts, as this provides search engines with additional signals about what your content is about, allowing them to suggest your content in relevant search results.
Headings represent the header structure of your blog post or page, such as H2, H3, and H4 headers with proper HTML tags, while meta descriptions represent the preview text that appears beneath your page title in search results.
Implementing Categories and Tags
Categories and tags help you organize your website content and help visitors and search engines better navigate and understand it. Categories are used to organize content by subject or type, while tags can be used to organize content across categories based on keywords, dates, etc.
Create categories and tags from the Pages panel in Squarespace. Click on the page you want to categorize or tag,[設定とオプション]Go to.
Google My Business Integration
If you run a brick-and-mortar business, we also recommend integrating your website with Google My Business for local SEO. You can integrate your Squarespace site directly with Google My Business by selecting Marketing from the Home menu, then Manage Locations. From there, select Add Location and click Import from Google.