About this Squarespace video tutorial

Blog posts are a great way to bring organic traffic to your website.

If you are writing articles on topics that people want to read about, in theory, that will bring traffic to your website. But in order to actually get the traffic, you have to optimize that post for search (aka SEO = Search Engine Optimization). In this video I’m going to give you several tips on how to optimize your own Squarespace blog posts for search and traffic.

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So, let's go to the most recent post on my blog so I can show you around (watching the video will really help you following along here). I'm going to click the 3 little dots of my post and go into the settings. If you haven't already noticed, in the settings of each blog post, there's an SEO tab.

In this SEO tab, you can actually write a SEO description specifically for your blog post. It's optional, but if you're going to blame Squarespace for SEO problems, don't… because they're giving you all the tools, you just have to use them!

Another tool I recommend you use is this SEObility.net one where you can optimize the length of your descriptions. I honestly don't always do that for my blog posts though so let's see what this one comes out to be (I definitely do for the overall site description). The one I have added for this blog post is too long, which I suspected. I usually take the first sentence or so of my post and just add that in as the description. But let’s do this the right way and edit it down using the tool so the description length is optimized for search. Once it is - copy and paste it into the SEO tab description box of your blog post.

Once you do that, you can see the example above of what it will look like in search results. And then, make sure to hit save.

Okay, a couple other tips for you...

A lot of SEO has to do with content and layout and links. So there's a lot of things that go into creating a good SEO score for your website and just pages in general.

• So, are you using Headers correctly? The Header styling isn’t meant for looks/design… it’s how search engines “read” your content. Make sure to use headers to give your content a purposeful heirarchy.

• Are you including hyperlinks in your posts? Linking out to reputable sites (if/when relevant in your posts) help your site gain authority. You can also add links to other blog posts on your own site too! (Notice how I do both in this blog post).

• How much content do you have? See all this content I have? I take the transcripts of my videos and I put the text, in the blog post, because if someone is searching for an answer, me just posting a video might not be helpful, because Google doesn't know what is in my video, so I take all the text from my video and put it here so if someone is looking for an answer, that I cover in my video, it can be found in text and served up in search results. I believe it's like 700 words is like what they consider good for SEO.

Squarespace offers a lot of great tools for SEO, you just have to use them, and know what makes good SEO.

Those are my tips for if you're trying to boost your SEO blog posts, definitely do the individual blog post descriptions, optimize the description length, make sure your blog post has enough content, give us quality blog posts, get search-worthy keywords included in your post, give it some structure with headings and you'll be on your way to improving your SEO.

If you have any SEO questions for me that you want me to answer in future videos, let me know down in the comments. Otherwise I will see you in the next one.

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