Website SEO best practices

a very simple outline of general seo best practices for helping your Squarespace 7.1 website get found on google!

This video covers:

SEO BASICS
compressing + optimizing images
site page titles & meta descriptions
setting up google search console
HOW TO USE GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it's all the edits and tweaks you want to make to your website so that you can easily get found on Google by people that are searching for related keywords to your industry or searching for your brand name.

I'll show you how you can compress and optimize your images, how you can optimize your site title, page titles, and meta descriptions, and how you can set up Google Search Console and Google My Business. the basics

Again, there's a lot that goes into this, so don't worry if you feel overwhelmed by it. You can always revisit this later. I don't want this to be a stopping point for you not launching your website. You don't need to get all of this done before you launch, and arguably, you never need to do this if it's too much for you.

But, if it is a priority for you to get found on Google, and to be attracting more site traffic, this will be a helpful starting point.

These are just some options to get you started when you have the time and the headspace to start working on it. Keep in mind as there is a lot that goes into SEO, So this is by no means a comprehensive guide, think of this as the quick and streamlined version of basic SEO practices for your small business website.

The easiest and quickest way to optimize your website is going to be compressing your images. You're going to want to make sure that when you're uploading images, they're high quality and beautiful, but the file sizes aren't so large that it's going to slow down your site loading time, which Google and site visitors don't really like too much.

I also recommend optimizing your site title with basic keywords for your industry, as well as optimizing the titles and meta descriptions for each individual page on your website.

You should also set up your Google Search Console when you launch, and if you're a physical brick and mortar business, I also recommend setting up Google My Business.

If you have the time and the bandwidth, doing some basic keyword research will also help leaps and bounds.

Let's dig into all these.

The first thing I want you to be aware of is compressing your images. Again, having large files will reduce your site loading time, which isn't good for customer experience, and Google doesn't like it too much.

Before you even upload your images into Squarespace, you're going to want to compress the file sizes so that they fall underneath one megabyte.

To show you what this looks like, if we're pulling up one of our images, we can take a look at our file size. If you're on a Mac, the easiest way to do this is by sorting by list. And now we can automatically see the size. So this photo is quite large, 2. 9 megabytes.

We definitely want to make that smaller. Honestly, the easiest way I've found of doing this when I'm trying to batch a ton of images at once is just using an online compression tool. My favorite is compresspng.com. You can compress both JPEGs and PNG files, you'll just need to swap in between the two tabs.

In this case, this image is a JPEG, so we'll go ahead and just drag and drop it. You can also press Upload Files, and you can upload a ton of images at once, and they'll automatically begin compressing. So this has been reduced by 7%. I'll download it, and it'll go to my Downloads folder.

In this case, it only reduced it to 2. 7 megabytes, which I had a feeling was going to happen because it said it only reduced it by 7%. Typically, when you're compressing images, you want to look for a 50% reduction or more. In this case, I'll actually use a workaround. Again, if you're on a Mac, this is easy to do in preview.

You'll simply open the file. You'll go to Tools, and then Adjust Size. And you'll see, yeah, this is a huge file size. It's actually at 72 pixels per inch, so I'm going to bump that up to 300 just because I want to make sure it's nice and crisp. Technically speaking, for digital images, you only need it to be at 72, but I just always stick with 300.

But then, I'm going to actually adjust the size of the image. So I'll bring it down to about 5 inches by 3 inches. So now you can see here, even though I've increased the resolution, because I've changed the size, I've actually brought it down to 519 kilobytes. So that's actually perfect for uploading to the site.

I'll go ahead and press OK, and we'll see we still have a nice crisp image, but it's going to be much smaller. This is especially important if you're working with a brand photographer.

Make sure you ask your brand photographer when they deliver their final files to deliver both web quality images and high quality images, that way you won't have to worry about compressing them all manually.

For example, my photographer delivered both web size, which are all ready to upload, and high resolution files.

Once we've compressed all our photos, we can go into our site and just add them to any of our image blocks, and they're already compressed and ready to go.

I know this seems a little tedious but it really will help your site loading time so I do highly recommend it. If you want to take it a step further, you should also optimize your images with keywords.

For this, I'll typically start with keyword research, which is a whole separate thing, so I'll dive into that in a separate video. And based on the keywords I've discovered, I'll then plug them into image file names and meta descriptions.

You can actually edit your image file names directly in Squarespace, so as you see here, this was the file name that was uploaded, but if I wanted to add a keyword rich title, I can do so here.

You should also add image alt text, not only because this is another opportunity to help SEO, but it will help improve accessibility for anyone who's using screen readers.

Even though Squarespace lets you update your filenames directly, I do actually like updating my filenames for my images after I've compressed them, but before I've uploaded them to the site. This just helps me keep track of all the keywords that I've used for my images because they're still all stored on my computer.

Again, when you're just starting out, and if you don't have the time and bandwidth, you don't need to worry about this. It does definitely help your site get found on Google, but again, I don't want you to feel overwhelmed with all the things you need to do, so you can definitely skip that part.

However, I do recommend taking the time to optimize your images.

Once we've gotten all of our images optimized and uploaded, We'll want to optimize our site title as well as our individual page titles. The best way to access this is just by pressing your forward slash key to activate our search bar, and type SEO. We'll go to SEO Appearance and Squarespace actually has a bunch of resources that you can use to dive further into SEO because again, this is just a quick overview. What you're going to be looking for is at the bottom here. It's your site SEO description. You can add SEO keywords to this to make your site more visible to Google.

For an example of what this looks like for some of my clients. Instead of just titling this website for first and last as their name first and last, we've also added the description, Phoenix Restaurant and Bar.

This, helps Google categorize their site and understand the content of the site so that they're more likely to pop up on Google for related searches to Phoenix restaurants and bars. We've also updated the site meta description to have additional helpful descriptions as well.

Keep in mind when you're writing your meta descriptions and site titles, you don't want to just stuff keywords in the descriptions, you still want the descriptions to be really appealing to anyone who's finding you on Google.

I always recommend prioritizing readability and storytelling over SEO, meaning if you have a sentence that has a bunch of SEO keywords packed into it but it sounds really stiff and awkward, scrap it and go for something that feels genuine and authentic.

Another example for a client that we specifically focused on SEO optimization is Enough Period. Their site title, in addition to just the brand name, has this keyword, CBD for menstrual cramps. We've also included a bunch of relevant keywords in the meta description, like full spectrum, organic, hemp derived CBD products.

Keep in mind that the spots for entering our site title and our site description is going to be in two different places. So this spot here is going to be where we enter our actual site description, which is going to be this meta description that shows up for our homepage whenever we pop up on Google.

To add SEO keywords to our site title, we'll go back into edit site header, site title and logo, and we'll change our site title here to incorporate keywords in addition to our brand name.

To change the meta descriptions for every single page on our site, As you can see here, these have different meta descriptions for each page. We'll go into each individual page's SEO settings.

So we'll click Pages, select an individual page by clicking on the settings gear, and then you'll see this SEO option. If we don't add a title and SEO description, Squarespace will automatically generate it for us, but again, this is another helpful spot to enter SEO keywords.

The title, I actually typically don't edit because we should already have our overall site title optimized optimized, and I don't want to get too wordy. Our SEO description, however, is this meta description that pulls up in Google, and so this is an opportunity to add keywords to that description, as well as using natural language and storytelling to get people intrigued by the link, so even random strangers finding you on Google will want to click.

If nothing else for your site SEO, you should definitely set up Google Search Console. It indexes your site with Google, which basically says, Hey, hi, I'm here, I'm a website, please list me. Again, Squarespace makes this super easy because Google Search Console is already integrated within your site settings, so you can actually access it directly through your Squarespace dashboard.

If we go to Analytics and Search Keywords, If you haven't already set up your Google Search Console, it'll actually prompt you automatically to connect.

The steps are pretty straightforward, but if you need help, there's support documentation from Squarespace that shows you how to verify your site with Google search console. As always, if you have any questions or you run into any issues when you're setting this up, please feel free to email me at support@elocreativestudio. Com and I'm happy to give you some insight.

If you're a brick and mortar location, meaning you have a physical storefront, I also highly recommend setting up Google My Business. That's going to be this little box that populates when people Google you, so that way they can access your website, any relevant information, your hours, Google reviews, and photos.

You can technically also set this up if you don't have a physical location, but it's not as common. In my next video, I'll show you how to do some basic keyword research, so you can be a little bit more strategic about the exact keywords that you're plugging into your images, your site titles, and your meta descriptions.