Squarespace Blog Design: Formatting Blog Articles For Improved SEO
Formatting a Squarespace Blog For Search Results
Squarespace offers a beautiful, easy-to-use interface for integrating a blog with your website. Blogs are a great way to increase traffic to your site and help attract more paying customers. But when you're adding dozens if not hundreds of pages to your site through a blog, it's important to make sure that they are correctly formatted for search engines as well as for good user experience. Here are our best practices for Squarespace blog formatting:
Squarespace Blog Title and Heading Tags: Title Tags, H1, H2, H3
What is a Title Tag?
The title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. A page's title tag plays a vital role in SEO, user experience, and social media sharing. Squarespace displays the title of the webpage containing your blog posts as [Title of Post] - [Title of Website]. This title tag gets displayed in three significant places: the search engine results page, the web browser tab, and on external sites such as Facebook, which pulls this information into what gets displayed when your post is shared.
Watch The Video: Blogging Best Practices On Squarespace
Choose a short article title for your Squarespace blog post, ideally less than 60 characters, to prevent it from being cut off in search results. Include your primary or seed keyword early in the title; words at the beginning are scanned first by users and may impact your search results rankings and click-through rate. You don't need to include your brand name at the end of the title, as Squarespace will insert it for you.
What Are H2 & H3 Headings and Why Do They Matter?
Squarespace provides H1, H2 & H3 heading tag options within its Text Block and formatting toolbar. Typically, the H1 tag is used for the title of your post, while H2 & H3 headings allow you to structure the content of your article. Generally, you should have an H2 heading for each section of your article and H3 tags for any additional subsections.
Clear headings that describe the content of your page help search engines to detect the major themes of your site. They also break up the text, improving readability and comprehension for site users. While search engines give some additional weight to headings, their primary purpose should be to organize your content and inform your reader. Don't "keyword stuff" your headings -- place your focus keywords naturally as you describe and title the different sections of your article.
To add a heading to your content, choose Heading 2 or Heading 3 from the text format drop-down menu. These styles automatically create HTML tags in Squarespace.
Internal Linking Equals a Lower Bounce Rate
A "Bounce" happens when a user visits a single page of your site and then exits without clicking through to the rest of the site. The bounce rate is a particularly important metric for lead generation sites that sell specific services, which tend to have higher bounce rates than retail sites. For any website, a high bounce rate is bad -- your goal is to keep prospective clients engaged for as long as possible so that they will learn more about your organization and services.
Click here for more information on reducing bounce rate on your website.
Internal linking -- adding links to other pages of your site throughout a blog post -- helps reduce your bounce rate. In general, you want to link to your "money pages," the pages of your site that are most important to converting a visitor to a paying customer. Internal linking does not increase your search engine rankings, but it can significantly improve your visitor retention and in the long run, convert more leads into customers.
Why Add External Links in Your Blog Articles?
Many content authors are fearful that adding external links to their articles could potentially lead readers away from their site or negatively impact their search rankings. However, good external links that lead to relevant sites with additional information on your topic won't be penalized by search engines and will lend credibility to your site. These links show your readers that you are providing a truly informative, quality content experience on your page. As long as you aren't sending your users to spammy sites, external links will generally only improve your posts.
How Many Images Should Be on a Blog?
As an architect, interior designer, design-builder or landscape professional, images are the proof of your skills as a built improvement professional, and they should be included in every blog you publish. However, high-quality photos and graphic images can slow load speeds for your webpages and kill your search engine results rankings on mobile devices. The key to using images on your blog is to include one or two images that link back to a project, encouraging click-throughs to see the full gallery of your work. Limiting the number of images helps ensure that your page load speed is adequately fast despite while still giving a good representation of your work. A good rule of thumb is to include one image for every 350 words on your Squarespace blog page.
Optimize The Size Of Big Photographs
Research shows that 53% of users abandon a mobile website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. To avoid a slow load speed, optimize your images to keep the visual quality of the image high, but the file size low. Google provides an online tool for image optimization, but it's more useful to optimize your images before placing them on your site using tools like Jpeg Mini and Photoshop Elements. There are many guides and tools available online that can help you format your pictures for the web but I'm partial to Photoshop Elements. Even if you have Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop Elements is a fast tool for resizing images and making quick consistency tweaks to your images.
A Bunch Of Squarespace Blog Formatting Tips
Formatting your text in an easy-to-read and easy-to-understand way is key to any successful blog.
Focus on your intro. Make the introduction to your post strong, clear, and concise. Lay out what your reader can expect from the rest of the article. You generally have only a few sentences to grab someone's attention.
Keep paragraphs short. Large blocks of text are difficult to scan and understand, particularly on a screen. Your paragraphs should generally be 3-5 sentences long. (As you can tell, I have a hard time sticking to this rule)
Break up the text. We've already gone over the importance of headings for readability, but other ways to break up text such as numbered lists and bullet points can help your reader pull the most important info from your text.
Use active voice. Active voice means your sentences describe who does what, for example, "Our team installed beautiful custom cabinets" instead of "Custom cabinets were installed by our team." This makes for stronger, more impactful text.
Pay attention to fonts. Font size, line spacing, and paragraph width are all important factors in the readability of a piece of text. The default fonts of a Squarespace template are already chosen for maximum readability across devices. If you are changing them significantly, make sure you select an equally easy-to-use font choice.
While there may seem to be a lot of tips and advice to follow here, it won't take long before the formatting of each blog post becomes like second nature. Just remember, keep your images to a minimum, resize them for the web, write a page description, use your title tags correctly and of course researched keywords at a 15% insertion rate will help your article get found online.
More Advice On Blogging For Business and Squarespace Websites
About Michael Conway & Means-of-Production
Hey there! I’m Michael Conway. My firm builds Squarespace websites and marketing campaigns for built environment construction and design firms. I’ve been building Squarespace websites for over six years and have built websites for Clark Construction Group (Number 11 on the ENR Top 400) and as small as a one-person interior design practice. If you have questions about Squarespace or need a new website, we want to build it for you. Reach out to me at (603) 289-6616 or mc@means-of-production.com. I’m here to help.