Metatags & Squarespace
What Squarespace 5 does for SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your site’s ranking in search results.
While the factors search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use to rank sites are kept secret and change frequently, this guide provides an overview of how Squarespace 5 helps your site rank, and gives tips for optimizing your site for search engines.
Enable search engine indexing
A few settings
Here are the SEO-friendly features built in to every Squarespace 5 site:
- XHTML – Squarespace 5 sites use clean, valid XHTML. This helps crawlers scan the content on your site.
- Structure – The pages on Squarespace 5 sites are linked together in a coherent way, creating a solid underlying structure. This helps crawlers move through the pages of your site.
- Embedded RSS – The RSS feeds for Journal pages are embedded in the code of your pages. Sites with RSS are crawled more frequently than static sites.
- Domain mapping – If you’re using a custom domain, our squarespace.com domain is completely removed from all code on your site, which indicates that your site is indexed properly at the domain’s location.
- Clean titles and URLs – All major pages on your Squarespace 5 site have properly-formatted titles and distinct URLs that are free from special characters.
- Robots.txt file – Squarespace 5 includes a robots.txt file to automatically hide content that shouldn’t be indexed, such as searches and send email pages. To see what content is blocked, add /robots.txt after your built-in domain, like this: http://xxx.squarespace.com/robots.txt, where xxx is your account name.
Although Squarespace 5 sites are optimized for search engines, there are some things you can do to help increase the visibility of your site pages.
Optimize title order
Page titles appear in browser tabs and search results, and are indexed by search engines. Page names often contain keywords that can relate to search terms. Structuring your site to prioritize page titles over your site name helps search engines find relevant content.
Check Optimize Title Ordering to place page titles before the site name in the browser address bar, so it appears as:
Page Title – Site Name
Enable page descriptions
Page-specific descriptions usually display beneath search results linking to that page, rather than the main site description.
Check Create Page Specific Description Tags to add a description field to each page’s configuration menu. Then add a description to each page on your site. Page descriptions can have up to 350 characters.
Search engines won’t notice changes to your site instantaneously. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site’s search presence. Whenever you make major changes to your site, you can request that a search engine re-index your content by using these services.
For help, visit the following guides on our Squarespace 7 help site: