How can I optimise my website so search engines find my site?

Now that you have finished building your website, how do you get customers and search engines to find your website? If your website is relatively small - when it has 10 to 20 pages - there is limited content for search engines to find. Here are 10 helpful tips on what to do to optimise your website and improve its visibility and ranking on search engines.

1. Add more content and pages to your website
The more pages you have, the more chances a search engine will find your site. A great way of adding new pages is by having a Blog (or newsletter) or a News page that you add regular articles to.

If you add extra pages to your website, try and include words in the page name that help your search results - for example, if you were to have some shops that stock your products, make sure the page title is helpful ie. “your-brandname-stockists”.

A Squarespace article that is helps with information on setting up a Blog: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543727-Blogging-with-Squarespace

2. Include more key words ie. your business name, product name or brand name
Include more text on your website with your business name, product name or brand name - and any other key words that you think are important - included within the text. Search engines search websites for the appearance of the key words and the more times those words appear the better your website will rank.

If you have different brands or product names, then focus on using a particular name on each page - so if someone searches for a particular product, the page with that product information will be found.

A useful Squarespace article on key word best practices:  https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042624571

Include your key words in your image filenames ie. "Business_name_product-300g.jpg"
Included your business, product name or brand name in your image titles when you add them to your site. When you add additional images continue the same practice. Squarespace will automatically create what is called “alt” text which is associated with the image. Search engines search for appearance of your key words in text and “alt” text associated with images - the more appearances the better.

3. Set-up and link your social media to your website
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and Tumblr are all fantastic ways of increasing your business presence on the internet. They not only provide the opportunity to showcase your products in a different way and to different audiences, they also give you a way of directing people to your website. By including links from your social media accounts to your website, another new customer may click on a link and find your website. And search engines like this fact - and so the more links you have to your website the more search engines will like your website. 

And make sure every time you add an image, or publish a post in your social media add a link to a relevant page on your website.

You don’t need to use all of the different social media … but use the ones that are most relevant to your business. Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr are perfect for showing your product images. Facebook is great for telling more of a story.

A couple of articles that provide information on connecting your social media to your Squarespace website that are useful:
Facebook: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206544007
Instagram: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814648
LinkedIn: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543037
Pinterest: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543577
Twitter: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543317
Tumblr: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543007

A general article on connecting social accounts: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543537-Connecting-social-accounts

4. Social media provides content for your website
Remember … the more content that is on your website, the more content search engines have to search, and the more they will like and find you. So, your social media is a wonderful way of adding content to your website. By linking your Instagram account to your website you can display your Instagram images on your website … automatically. An example of this is at the foot of our website homepage - our Instagram images are automatically displayed and changed when a new image is posted in our Instagram account. You can also link and display your twitter feed.

5. Use your website to share content on social media
Save time by publishing content on your website that is automatically published on your social media accounts. This is called “pushing” content to your social media … and by connecting your website to social media you can add blog articles, events, new products, and gallery images to your website that are automatically “pushed” to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr.

This article outlines how to share content on social media: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206543937

6. Add as many links to and from your website
Linking to other websites and adding links from other websites to your site is an obvious way of getting people to visit your website. Adding links from associated websites or from other websites that are happy to recommend you are ways of getting people to your website. Work with other people to improve each other’s website rankings by linking to each other’s sites.

7. Use email marketing to encourage people to visit your website
Once you have set-up a Blog (ie. a newsletter or latest news) and publish regular articles, get people to subscribe to your Blog. Once someone has subscribed you can send them regular emails and is a terrific way of keeping in contact with your customers - and also encouraging them to visit your website. Search engines rank websites that are visited more often ahead of websites that are visited less.

You can use MailChimp to build a subscription database and to send emails to the subscribers (free to use up to 2,000 subscribers), or use Squarespace Email Campaigns. MailChimp is integrated with Squarespace.

An article on using MailChimp to build a database and send emails: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815508

An article about Squarespace’s Email Campaigns: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001280828

8. Squarespace tools to improve your search results
Squarespace provides a set of tools to improve your search engine results. The following article is an introduction to how to increase your website’s visibility: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205814568

9. Create a Google My Business profile
As Google is the most commonly used search engine, the more you can do to be seen favourably by Google the better. One essential way is to set up a “Google My Business” listing. Squarespace is integrated with “Google My Business” - this article is helpful for managing your business listings online: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029955931

More information about “Google My Business” can be found using the following link: https://www.google.com/business/

Once you have your Google My Business listing encourage satisfied customers to write a review for you … people read these reviews and Google loves them!

10. Verify your site with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service that helps you see how your website is viewed by Google. Through Google Search Console you can ask Google to index your site (ie. search your site for content). This is particularly good to do when you have made significant changes to your website - or added a range of new products.

This article provides an introduction to using the Google Search Console: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205813918

If you work your way through this list of suggestions your website rankings will improve. Make it a regular habit to keep adding content to your website - the easiest way is by adding Blog articles. The time spent will pay off in better rankings, better visibility and more customers.

What is CSS?

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the main markup language for displaying web pages and other information that can be displayed in a web browser.

HTML was developed to define the content of a document but it was never intended for it to be used to format the document.

As HTML evolved tags like 'font' and 'color' were added to provide more formating options. This added a requirement for considerably more HTML code to be written for every page and made it very difficult for web developers of large websites.

To solve this problem, in 1997, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.

Style sheets are the technical specifications for a layout and also tell the web browser how to render the document, and are a separate document to the HTML page of a website.

External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in a website by editing one single file – thus saving considerable programming time.

Since the initial introduction, CSS is being used to define more and more elements on a web page.

All browsers support CSS, however, older browsers will not support some aspects of CSS 3 – the latest release.

Mosaic Studios can customise the look of your Squarespace website using CSS.