As the founder of Nomadic Advertising, a digital marketing agency, I was recently invited as a guest on a podcast where I shared my insights and experiences related to various topics in the digital marketing realm. One of the topics we discussed in-depth was the versatile and widely used CMS platform, WordPress. I spoke on the reasons why WordPress is a favored platform by many of our clients, which includes its flexibility, risk mitigation, and its self-hosted nature. The platform provides clients with the freedom to make any changes to their website’s code without restrictions. Additionally, it is the most widely used CMS platform on the internet and has budget-friendly options. However, I also acknowledge that other platforms like Wix and Squarespace have their use cases in the digital marketing space, especially for individuals who are not web developers and have limited capital.

We then transitioned to a more complex topic of blockchain and fintech industries and how companies can effectively market themselves in such industries. I pointed out that these industries have unique vocabularies that can be difficult for people to comprehend, and ad platforms like Google and Facebook are often reluctant to accept advertisements from companies in these industries due to bad actors, making marketing a challenging feat. To overcome these challenges, I recommended that companies in these industries focus on organic marketing channels such as search engine optimization (SEO) and create educational content to help users understand their industry. By focusing on organic channels, companies can avoid concerns regarding ad accounts getting disapproved or shutdown. Through organic content, companies can build a community, generate organic traffic and position themselves as an authority in the space. As many companies, including major players like FTX and Celsius, are imploding, the time is right for new companies to establish themselves as authorities in the space. Thus, in a nutshell, my recommendation for any company in a highly technical space with a lot of confusion is to create content-driven marketing, build a community, and become an authority in the space.

As an experienced entrepreneur, I also shared valuable tips with the audience during the podcast. One of the tips I shared was the importance of developing a unique approach instead of copying competitors. I related my experience of going door-to-door to sell my services and failing to make a single sale. Instead, I had to discover my own approach to grow my business.

Another critical tip I shared was the importance of prioritizing sales, as no business can exist without them. While my background is technical, and I initially focused on having the best SEO and technical components, I soon realized that sales should come first. I advised listeners not to expect any marketing hack to grow their business and to be relentless in their efforts to make sales.

While some may disagree with my approach of not focusing on one industry and instead working with clients from various industries, I emphasized the importance of doing what works for oneself. I also acknowledged that what may work for one person may not work for another.

Overall, the podcast provided an excellent opportunity for me to share my insights and experiences with the audience. I hope it will be helpful to those looking to improve their digital marketing strategies. I encourage everyone to listen to the full podcast and learn how to apply the tips and strategies discussed to their business.

The post WordPress, Blockchain Marketing & More appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

You can see an image Google shared demonstrating the difference below:

What does this mean for SEO?

In my opinion the new design makes it easier for Google to blend ads in with Organic results. I think that the distinction of an ad from an organic result has becoming increasingly difficult for the user to be able to tell.

This is not good for SEO as many users will click an ad when they believe they are clicking the organic result. This also makes it even more important than ever before for your site to have a favicon.

I do think highlighting the favicon is a great idea because it makes it easier to tell if you are visiting the right site (when re-visiting a site you have been on before). Although I wish Google had done it while keeping the green ad icon users are used to instead of switching to a dark generic “ad” text.

How do I check if my site already has a favicon?

You should be able to see a little icon next to your site’s title inside your browsers tab. If you do not see it than your site probably doesn’t have a favicon, you can use this tool to double check: https://realfavicongenerator.net/favicon_checker

How do I create a favicon?

Creating a favicon is as simple as resizing an image and putting it into the right format. Choosing your image is the hardest part, generally I recommend using a part of your logo. Since the favicon is shown at really small sizes your picture should have as little detail as possible and be easy to identify at small sizes.

You can use this tool to automatically resize it and put it in the right format for you.

How do I add a favicon to my site?

If you don’t have a favicon on your site you will probably want to add one.

If your using a WordPress website usually your theme will have an option to add a favicon to it. Check your theme’s documentation to find it if you are unsure where it is.

If you are using a website builder such as Squarespace or Weebly you should be able to find a spot to change the icon in the website settings.

If your website is custom built or your website builder does not have the option to add a favicon most modern browsers will use a favicon.ico file placed in the root directory of your site. In order to ensure your favicon gets picked up with all browsers add the following code between the <head> </head> tags on your website:

<link rel='icon' type='image/x-icon' href='/favicon.ico' />

Or if you icon is a png use this code:

<link rel='icon' type='image/png' href='/favicon.png' />

If you use the tool that I linked above than it will automatically provide you with the code required to add to your website.

The post Google Search to Feature Favicons on Mobile appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Identifying a good developer is hard and there is many possible things that could go wrong in the process.

I have built a lot of websites as well as worked on websites built by other developers (sometimes terribly). So I have a lot of thoughts on this topic.

Here are some things I would tell other businesses to look out for:

1. Make sure you control the domain name for your website or you don’t own it.

2. How is the developer building the site? If they are using a common platform such as WordPress it makes it easy for you to modify the site going down the road. You don’t want a developer to use some sort of uncommon platform and then you are stuck working with them if you want to make any modifications.

3. Does the developer ask you basic questions such as:
– Where are the images coming from?
– Who is writing the content?
– How many pages is the site?

Without having these questions answered there is no way they can properly price the job and often I see web developers end up plagiarizing content/pictures from other websites online without the client even knowing! This is not good for SEO or brand reputation.

4. Does the developer/designer know anything about marketing? Are they focusing on making a conversion friendly site or are they just trying to create something passable.

There’s a lot of details that go into building a good website that are unnoticeable to the untrained eye. I could mention a bunch more details including technical details such as ensuring images are compressed for fast load time, SSL is installed for security, meta tags are included.etc

At the end of the day websites are not cheap, and if they are there is a reason. This is one industry where you truly get what you pay for.

The post Choosing a Website Developer appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

3 myths about SEO with Squarespace 

There has been a lot of raving about the wonders Squarespace; even the least tech savvy of us can design a professional-looking website. Owners of small online businesses and bloggers, however, worry that the SEO aspect has been overlooked by Squarespace. The scarcity of hard information about the search engine optimization capabilities of Squarespace. Many in various forums claim that switching to Squarespace has affected their SEO ranking or that it inhibits them from manipulating various SEO-related parameters on the website.

a) Only WordPress works for SEO

What has driven this ideology is the availability and loud marketing of WordPress’s SEO plug-ins and add-ons. However, Squarespace has a few features of its own that allow you to make SEO pages and if these don’t suffice you can use Squarespace’s developer mode to enforce SEO at the code level. You can also use the measures below to further improve the SEO on your pages:

• Headings- Content with clearly formatted headings and subheadings will be easier for search engines to crawl through. It will be easier for search engines to detect your sites main themes if it is thus structured.
• Links- Infuse as many inbound links to your pages as you can without compromising the quality of your content. They don’t require much effort to create and are an organic way of increasing traffic.
• SEO titles- Page titles, post titles and site titles infused with keywords will rank better in search engine results. Instead of going with default titles, customize the titles to include keywords so that they are prioritized by the search algorithm.
• Content- Identify keywords which your audience usually type when looking for information on the Internet and make sure they are found in the pages of your site.

Additionally, use them in the ‘alt’ tags of your images. The length of your articles and posts also matters; the longer the better. You also need to post fresh content regularly; that is why sites with blogs where new posts are uploaded frequently rank well. When ranking websites on the results page, the Google algorithm takes all these factors into account.

Many times these are overlooked in favor of the latest SEO plug-ins or ‘cheat codes’. But any experienced developer or webmaster will tell you they are more important in determining how high up a website will appear in the SERPs. Any honest web professional will admit that most of the sales and queries on a site come from Google. The SEO tools provided by Squarespace should be enough to boost your rankings significantly.

b) Squarespace lowers your SEO ranking

This myth has been disproven by people who actually made the switch from WordPress to Squarespace. A blogger found that his ranking on Google’s results pages remained constant even after shifting his content to Squarespace. The same posts that ranked highly on Google in WordPress were equally easy to find when on Squarespace

c) Squarespace doesn’t have SEO options

As we have seen in the first point, Squarespace has a number of features geared towards boosting a site’s visibility. Although Squarespace is not open source, features like XML sitemaps that automatically update themselves, automatic tagging and URL cleaning can greatly impact a site’s SEO. On top of this, you can roll up your sleeves and tweak the HTML code or scripts in Squarespace’s developer mode to further increase the visibility of your site.

Squarespace Seo Settings

SEO Sqaurespace – The Reality

Squarespace has taken a reputational beating in regards to its SEO capabilities. The myths we have discussed above are widely held, but how true are they? Is there a way you can get the aesthetics Squarespace is renowned and still have your site rank highly in search results pages? One company, Elle and Company Design, actually experienced a huge jump in their traffic figures when they moved to Squarespace.

So it is not unimaginable to have a Squarespace website that can help in improving SEO. However, let no one misguide you into thinking that Squarespace is the silver bullet for your website’s substandard search engine ranking. If it wasn’t doing well on other platforms like WordPress, it won’t suddenly jump up the Google results pages. And neither will be moving it from Squarespace to WordPress, now that many folks seem to think WordPress the king of SEO.

Whether your site is on Squarespace or WordPress or Wix or Weebly, you need to do your research and get the facts and then make targeted efforts at boosting optimization. The winning formula doesn’t change. You need to find out what it takes to get good on-page and off-page SEO and do it.

On-page SEO refers to the use of keywords, image and at tags along with other measures to optimize a webpage. Off-page mainly refers to getting inbound links from other websites to your webpage. The more links there are to your site from other reputable sites, the more Google thinks your content is worth reading, hence the higher it’s ranking in results pages. The question, therefore, is if Squarespace supports these measures, or if it supports them as well as WordPress.

In determining the usefulness of Squarespace in improving SEO, it is important to take heed to the opinions of people who have actually used the platform. Leading blog and tutorial site Elle & Company devoted a recent post to discussing the impact of Squarespace on their traffic. They captured their research in the points below:

• Squarespace has inbuilt search engine optimization; so they claim on their website. According to the Squarespace founder Anthony Casalena, their platform has SEO built into it, as opposed to the SEO plug-ins offered by rival WordPress. “…you should not take the lack of a plug-in for this to mean that we didn’t actually just build it right from the start.” He further revealed that they regularly scan the top WordPress plug-ins for SEO to ensure that Squarespace has these features.
• The search engine description area provided in the Squarespace backend, if used well, can have a positive impact on a site’s Google page rank. Elle & Co. have taken the trouble to fill in a clear search engine description containing keywords they feel visitors will search for. When you do a Google search for Elle and Company, this description appears next to the company name.
• In addition to this, Squarespace offers a place for a site title in its design panel. Having filed in this detail, web crawlers are better able to understand what Elle & Co. is all about, improving the chances of it appearing at the top in related searches. Not only does this title appear on the site, it appears on other websites and searches engine results.
• Anyone well versed in SEO will know the importance of a sitemap. Squarespace offers users a sitemap which helps web crawlers to both find and categorize content more easily. To make a website’s sitemap easier for Google to locate, you can add it to Google Webmaster Tools. This allows the search engine to do a better job of optimizing the website.

From the usage of these features on Squarespace, Elle & Co. say their traffic numbers grew 500% four months into their subscription.

It is also wise to sit at the feet of industry experts like Rand Fishkin, CEO, and co-founder of SEOmoz, one of the world’s leading SEO startups. Not only does he vouch for Squarespace as a company, he thinks the SEO features they provide are “solid” and more user-friendly than on WordPress. He acknowledges that the then current version of Squarespace (v6), had made huge strides in implementing SEO as compared to Squarespace 5. However, he noted that those who would like more flexibility in terms of customization may prefer to work with WordPress. That said, the Squarespace 7, the latest version of the platform, has been designed to offer more to the developer, allowing them to build a site from scratch or incorporate third-party tools.

Choosing an SEO-Friendly Theme

Now that we have established that Squarespace is not quite the SEO laggard it had a reputation for being in the past, let’s dive into how the platform can be made to contribute to your site’s SEO.  The first area we’ll look at is themes. Knowing which Squarespace themes are helpful in terms of SEO can help you sift through the myriads available and settle on what your site will use. Now that they won’t come with ‘SEO’ labels, how will you tell which themes are SEO-friendly? Check out the points below:

• Text: Visual-intensive themes are excellent, especially for artist and photographer sites. However, the fact that they leave little room for text may work against them when it comes to search engine rankings. Web crawlers are not designed to parse images on their own, they only work with text. So beyond aesthetics, think about how easy your chosen theme will make it for Google to find.
• Speed: When dealing with visitors with increasingly lower attention spans, speed is everything. Templates don’t all load at the same speed so this will be an important differentiating factor. It’s difficult to test the speed of the theme using the Squarespace demo but try and keep tabs on how fast the test site loads.

Unlike other website builders, you don’t have to worry about features not working with Squarespace. This platform is renowned for testing all the features on their templates thoroughly before release. In the rare event you find a bug, Squarespace provides able support. There is plenty of information on their website to answer most FAQs and they provide prompt live chat support that’s available 24/7.

Submitting your sitemap to the Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

It only makes sense for any website owner looking to generate traffic to let the Internet’s two biggest search engines know that your site exists. That is the essence of registering a website with Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console. If they are aware of your site’s existence, it is more likely that their web crawlers will look through your pages

To be sure of good SEO rankings, it is important to register both versions of your site with Google Search Console. You also need to register both the site URL with the ‘www’ prefix and the one without.

Before we proceed we need to explain what Google Search Console is. It is a free online tool Google provides to webmasters to manage to improve the ranking of their sites in search results pages. At one point this set of tools went by the name ‘Google Webmaster Tools’. Using the Google Search Console you can check the indexing status of a website through a variety of parameters and request Google to index your site.

There are some steps you need to take before you can be able to verify your site using the search console.

1. Create a Google account; most any user of the Internet will have this already.
2. Upgrade to a paid Squarespace subscription if you were using the trial version.
3. Remove all page or site-wide passwords. These can be reinstituted after the verification of the site is done.

Having done the above you can log in to the Google Search Console using your Google credentials through the https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools URL then follow the procedure below:

1. Enter your primary domain name using ‘www’ prefix and ‘https’ if it has them, then click ‘Add property’.
2. Go to the ‘Alternate methods’ tab and copy the meta tag provided on your homepage.
3. Log into your Squarespace page and go to the ‘Code injection’ screen where you will paste the tag copied in the header field.
4. Return to the Google console and click ‘Verify’. If all is well you will get a successful verification message.
5. After verifying your site you can go ahead and make a request for Google to index it from the console.

Integrating Google analytics to your Squarespace website

The website analytics tool that Google offers webmasters and website owners generates critical statistics that can help them monitor traffic. Squarespace has provided subscribers with a way of incorporating this visitor tracking tool on their websites.

Your first step will be to sign up for a Google Analytics account; a simple process which is even easier if you have a Google account. You will need to select if you want to track a website or a mobile app then provide an account name among other details. Once done you will get a tracking ID, which will be required when setting up Google Analytics on Squarespace. The procedure is as follows:

1. Under the ‘Settings’ menu, select ‘Advanced’
2. Under ‘Advanced’ click on ‘External services’
3. Enter your tracking ID in the field provided and save.

In addition to visitor traffic data, Google Analytics can provide you with data about shoppers in your e-commerce store if you have one. For every online order, it can tell you the order ID, product name and purchase total, among other details. Furthermore, you can integrate an update to Google Analytics called Universal Analytics by following the steps below:

1. In Advanced settings select ‘External services’
2. Keep Google Analytics Account number blank and then save
3. Log into Google Analytics and find your Universal Analytics tracking code
4. Paste this code into Header Code Injection.

Ensure your Squarespace site is loading fast

Users generally prefer websites that load quickly to those that lag and Google takes this into account when ranking pages in its results. Here are some tips you can implement on Squarespace to ensure your pages are not penalized on loading speed and do well on SEO:

1. Squarespace’s SSL is faster as it uses the HTTP/2 protocol. Use this version of SSL.
2. Minimize the number of different fonts in your site’s textual content. If you can keep it at no more than two, the better. Another alternative is to use web safe fonts: Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman, Courier and Courier New.
3. Make use of compression tools like Tiny Png to minimize sizes of your site’s images.
4. Avoid or minimize the use of third-party scripts or custom code.
5. Turn ‘AMP’ on; this load’s fast-loading versions of your posts in a mobile search. All you need to do is check the ‘AMP Enabled’ button in the Blogging settings.
6. Use tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix to test your site’s loading speed from different locations around the globe.

Where possible, use the SSL version of your site

Since 2014 Google has made it clear that they prefer websites that use secure socket layer (SSL) technology. This is a measure that encrypts communications between client and server, making them less susceptible to eavesdroppers and session hijackers.

With Squarespace, adopting SSL is a very simple process, which simply involves checking a box in the settings. Sites that have been secured using SSL will have ‘https’ in their URL. When you enable SSL on Squarespace the platform automatically creates hundreds of redirects from the unsecured version of the site to the https one. This means that searches that return the old HTTP site will route the Internet user back to the secure site.

SSL is a great way of keeping your site and its users safe from malicious eavesdroppers keen on perpetrating man-in-the-middle attacks. As part of its commitment to enhancing security on the Internet, Google began its ‘HTTPS everywhere’ campaign in 2014. One of the action points of this campaign was incorporating secure connections into its search algorithm. They hope to push website owners and webmasters to embrace SSL by using it as part of its ranking criteria. Even Google’s Chrome browser comes with features that indicate to web users whether the site they’re visiting is secure or not secure.

All it takes to enable SSL on your Squarespace site is to check the ‘Secure’ option in the ‘Security Preference’ dialog in the Security & SSL settings. Checking the ‘HSTS’ option further ensures that browsers only ever load the https version of your website.

If you had an ‘http’ site created on a different website builder which you want to secure, you can do so but there are some things you need to consider. You might need to get in touch with Squarespace support to ensure you don’t get lower search result rankings. This might happen because of lack of redirects to the newly secured site.

Doing On-Page SEO on Squarespace

Your content

Here are some points to bear in mind to help with improving SEO for your Squarespace site:

• Quality – Will your readers come away with real information that can benefit them or can be used practically? If the answer is yes then Google will place your pages higher in search results. It is no longer enough to have paragraphs of gibberish stuffed with keywords; indeed, Google’s algorithm has been specifically designed to detect and penalize such websites. Well-written guides and tutorials will always rank highly for this reason.
• Quantity – Your content needs not only to be something readers can chew on and use, it needs to be plentiful. Article pages should be long and filled with engaging material. Try to ensure your pages or blog posts are at least 500 words long. Also, try to cover as many topics as possible within the chosen theme of your website. The more pages you have of helpful info, the higher search engines will rank them.
• Focus – Plentiful as your content should be, it should be kept centered around a single topic. Select a primary keyword you or keyword phrase you want to be ranked for and then a few long-tail keywords and distributed them in your paragraphs in such way they read naturally. That last part is important. While high keyword density is good, if you have too many keywords packed into a short page, the web crawlers might think it spams.
• Originality – Copy-pasting content from other sources to your site may save you time and effort, but it will hurt your ranking on results pages. Instead, run your content through Copyscape before you publish it to ensure it doesn’t look like anything else out there on the Internet. If Google thinks you’ve lazily plagiarized someone else’s posts, you will be penalized.

Keywords in titles and descriptions

Setting meta titles and descriptions for individual pages in Squarespace has proved to be one of the platform’s undoings. Squarespace does not offer the flexibility other website builders and CMS offer though it allows you to edit a set of tags in your template. You will find these in the ‘options’ icon for each page where you can put in a title of no more than 55 characters and a description of 150 characters max. Here is where you can add your keywords to improve your Google ranking.

Using proper headings

Most non-developer website owners and designers make the mistake of overlooking headings when writing content or adding posts. Instead of using proper headings they opt for a different font size, capitalizing text or simply bolding some words. This leads to headings that are indistinguishable for vision-impaired web users and content that is generally untidy and difficult to read. Most importantly, search engines will have to work harder to index your pages, which will do harm to their ranking on Google.

With how easy Squarespace makes it apply headings, there’s no excuse for your pages to be untidy and miss out on SEO optimization. All you need to do is type out your desired text, highlight the given heading and then apply either heading 1, 2 or 3 using the format drop-down menu in the text editor. You have categories h1 to h6 to help (though h1 to h3 are most commonly used) you structure your content neatly with headings and subheadings.

Adding relevant meta descriptions

Whenever you do a search on Google, you will find that under each link in the results page, there is a brief description of what information you’ll find on the destination page. This is what’s referred to as a meta description. Though meta descriptions themselves are not factored into Google’s search algorithm, they have an indirect role in your SEO.

Clear meta descriptions that are relevant to the topic and content will enjoy better click-through rates (CTR), i.e., more web users are likely to click on the link and visit your site. Pages with higher CTR have a chance of appearing higher on the results page as Google factors this in when ranking.

Squarespace has not one, not two, but three places in which you can edit your meta descriptions; on the home page, static pages and blog posts.

Homepage: Go to ‘Settings’ then click on ‘SEO’. You will find a field titled ‘Search Engine Description’ where you can put your meta description.

Static page: Go to ‘Pages’ put the cursor over the page you want to edit, click and then fill in the ‘Description’ field below.

Blog post: In the edit mode of the post, click ‘Settings’. Enter a description of the post in the ‘Excerpt’ box presented at the bottom of the page.

The main problem with how Squarespace handles meta descriptions is that the meta description may end up being published on the site, instead of appearing only in the search engine results. This is generally not a good look and has been a source of frustration for many a website owner and webmaster.

Adding alt text and optimizing image names

Web crawlers are largely dependent on text to determine the quality of content on a page and hence it’s ranking in the search engine results pages. The primary use of alt text, though, was to have a textual description of what an image was about in case it failed to load on a webpage.

However, visually impaired web users have found these descriptions useful for helping them understand what purpose the image was to serve. This is thanks to the availability of assistive technology such as screen readers.

By adding keywords to the alt text in your images, you can boost the SEO of your Squarespace webpages. But most webmasters and designers agree that adding alt text on Squarespace is not the most straightforward process. First of all, it is not referred to by that name on the Squarespace image editor. Alt text is referred to as ‘Caption’ and you will find it as one of the two options in the ‘Inline’ button on the ‘Design’ tab. The other option is ‘Do Not Display Caption’.

The above steps are for adding alt text to images within copy on a page. You also have the option of adding alt text to a cover page image, gallery image, image block or thumbnail image. Adding alt text to each of these categories of images has a slightly different procedure. Furthermore, if you would like to change your image layout, you have to ensure you fit in your alt text description before changing.

A good many designers find this process needlessly complicated and a hindrance to implementing good SEO on a website. Thankfully Squarespace has a clear, detailed help page about adding alt text to each kind of image.

Optimizing the URL structure

Squarespace, to some extent, makes up for the alt text shortcomings by providing automatic clean URLs for your web pages. You won’t have URLs crammed with special characters and numbers that give both search engine users and web crawlers no clues as to what the page is about. While this automated URL cleaning works very well for static pages, blog post URLs don’t appear so tidy with a date tacked onto them. Not only does it make the URL needlessly longer, it might force you to update the URL if you later update the post.

You don’t need to keep the dated URL on a Squarespace blog page; the platform allows you to tweak it in the edit mode. In the ‘Options’ tab, you will find a place to create a custom URL. If you would rather your blog URLs automatically follow a given pattern instead of editing each of them manually, Squarespace allows you to create a format. This is done in the ‘Blogging’ settings. Here there is a field for ‘Post URL format’.

Below are some tips you can use to ensure your webpage URL is optimized for search engines:

• Infuse relevant keywords in your URL but keep it short.
• Separate the keywords in your URL so that they are clearly legible to both the search engine bots and human readers.
• Use hyphens to separate the keywords as opposed to underscores.

Adding rich snippets to Squarespace

What are rich snippets? They are the responses presented by Google to a user query that are not links to other web pages. They are prominently displayed on search results pages and are considered by some a threat to their websites. Research has shown that Google is answering more and more searches with rich answers. Recent figures showed that rich answers are displayed for close to 30% of all searches and this figure is projected to rise.

With this in mind, it would be wise for any webmaster or designer to investigate how rich answers can be used to achieve higher SERP rankings. One of the ways this can be done is sprinkling rich snippets strategically on your website. By doing so your chances of being featured in one of Google’s related rich answers will be much higher. Having concise answers to questions users are likely to type when searching for related content near the top of your posts or webpages is a clever move in this regard.

Squarespace itself does not provide a straightforward way to hike your chances of being featured in rich answers. Web designers have in the past tried in vain to add Schema Markup code to that of web pages for the generation of rich snippets. Schema Markup HTML is defined by Schema.org, a body created by the top search companies, including Google, to help webmasters know how to present information to search engines. If you contact Squarespace support, they will likely direct you to the Data Highlighter provided by Google to help structure data in web pages. If you are successful in using this method you won’t be able to use Schema Markup code on those pages.

To be able to use the data highlighter, you need to create page sets of pages with related data. You then need to give Google time to crawl your site and create a cached copy of it. For more information on how you can improve your chances of being included in Google’s featured snippets see my guest post on Flash Point Marketing.

Link your social media accounts

The advent of social media has made it even easier to shout about your website and blog posts. It, in fact, allows your readers to do so on your behalf. So naturally, one of the key selling points of any website builder or CMS is its capacity for allowing content to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. These could potentially make your content go viral and become a worldwide sensation at the snap of a finger.

A good number of the templates Squarespace offers have social media share buttons included. All you need to do is to enable the channels you want in edit mode.

Doing Off-page SEO on Squarespace

We have seen the different ways you can boost SEO by tweaking settings on your Squarespace site. But how can the platform help with off-page SEO?

The importance of backlinks

A backlink is a link to another website that leads back to your website. The Google algorithm factors the number of quality backlinks leading to your pages when ranking them. Many links leading back to your site indicates to search engines that you have important information on the subject in question. Google will consider you a sort of authority on the subject and rank your page higher in the SERPs. The quality of an inbound link is determined by how relevant it is to what your content is about.

Focus on white hat link building strategy

Knowing that backlinks are a key contributing factor to good SEO, many webmasters have succumbed to the temptation to get links from link farms or placing hidden links on other sites. As a result, Google has cracked the whip and can now ban a site found to be using such shortcuts from appearing in its results pages.

To avoid such a fate, it is important to take time and build these links organically. Seek out websites with related content and communicate with them to ask for backlinks. There are tools available to help you search for websites with related content.

Your website will be rated better by Google if it has some of your keywords in the anchor text. Anchor texts are the words which contain the hyperlink to your webpage. Again, there are tools webmasters can use to find out what anchor text external websites are using to link back to their site. If you find the text is unrelated to the keywords you want to rank for, get in touch with the website administrator and request them to change the text.

Now that Squarespace, we have established, does well with helping you work on on-page SEO, but can it contribute to on-page SEO? More specifically, can Squarespace help in creating quality backlinks? Yes, it can. As we discussed previously, Squarespace can help you make URLs that are easier for web crawlers to work on an index.

Tracking Results on Your SEO for Squarespace

After doing the hard work of optimizing your site for search engines, it is important that you keep track of how effective your SEO campaign is. You don’t have to do this with manual searches; not when you have tools like SERPWatcher.

What it offers

SERPWatcher offers a lot of useful information to help webmasters monitor the effectiveness of their keyword usage across different platforms. Some useful stats it presents include:

• Top ranking keywords
• Keyword position flow and distribution
• Estimated site visits
• Separate keyword stats for desktop and mobile site versions

How it works

After signing up to mangools, log into your account. You will automatically be presented with the ‘trackings’ page. To set up a new tracking, follow the steps below:

1. Key in your domain
2. Set the locality of your domain
3. Select either mobile or desktop search platform
4. Input keywords you wish to track and hit ‘Start tracking’

Note that keywords don’t have to be typed in; you can import them from a CSV or TXT file. You can also import from an existing KWFinder list if you have one. Also, note that you can modify keywords while tracking is active.

The tracking page

You can access this section by clicking the ‘Trackings’ button on the header of SERPWatcher. What you will see is a summary of all the domains that you are tracking. There are options to delete or clone the tracking to the right of each tracking tab.

Dashboard

This is an easier way to view and access the features of SERPWatcher. It presents the user with a two-column interface through which you can view keywords, search volumes and changes in their SERP position. This interface also allows you to view either result for a desktop or mobile searches.

The post Ultimate Guide to Optimize SEO for Squarespace appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Search engines have a set of rules, or a formula, if you like, through which they determine the content of one website is more relevant to an online query than that of another. The more visible your site is, the more likely it is that more people who search for stuff will end up on it.

For online businesses, whether a web user clicks on your link in a search engine could be the difference between a sale and a lost sale. For those with websites with pay-per-click ads, it could be the difference between good revenue and painful losses.

Appearing at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) acts as a sort of endorsement which means your site is safe and trustworthy. The more trustworthy web users feel your site is, the more likely they are to share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels.

As they strive to measure up to the ‘rules’ laid out by search engines, web masters refine the quality of content on their websites. This is because the guidelines that shape search engine algorithms are set with the reader in mind.

Google, Bing and the like want to ensure that Internet users find well written, relevant and informative content easily. In much the same way, SEO guidelines serve to standardize content, a feature websites with many different content contributors will find useful.

Why SEO is Important?

With a plan, like pretty much everything in life with chances of succeeding. Key to your SEO strategy are keywords; the words or phrases that you think people will type into search engines when looking for web content related to yours. You will get these from the topics you blog about, the products you sell or services you offer.

Think of what questions an average Internet user or a typical customer of yours will ask when searching for information on your goods or services. Come up with a list of between 15 and 20 keywords or keyword phrases and then run them through the KWFinder or some free tool like Google Keyword Planner so that you know if they really are as common as you think they are. These tools gives statistics like the number of searches of a particular keyword in a month.

After generating a list of keywords you need to take a look at your existing web pages and blog posts to see if the keywords appear enough times and in a natural way to get the attention of search engine crawlers. If this is not the case you need to optimize your content by strategically adding these keywords and keyword phrases. Also make sure you do not get into keyword stuffing, which means adding keywords too many times in a content to get attention of search engines, remember that this is a unethical practice and could bring penalties to your site.

What Weebly says about its SEO?

If you are not on Weebly’s premium plans, your site won’t be indexed by Google, meaning your pages will be locked out of the  Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). You have to upgrade to a paid-up monthly or annual package for Weebly to apply tools that will let your site be crawled by search engine bots and cached.

Weebly boasts a detailed SEO section in their Help Centre. It offers website owners and webmasters info on On-page SEO, Off-site SEO, how to build inbound links and how to utilize the Google search console among other tips.

One of the points on which Weebly beats other website builders is its user-friendliness. Non-tech users can quickly build a site using this platform without much hassle. But when it comes to suitability for SEO, Weebly falls short, especially in comparison to competitors like WordPress. It is not surprise that close to 50% of the top one million websites in existence today are built on WP, not Weebly. The adaptability of WordPress allows it to be useful to big multinationals as well as to small startups. It offers a wide array of plugins to handle many different functionalities.

We have highlighted how you can Weebly can improve your SEO in this brief tutorial.

Weebly SEO Optimization – Basics to Rank

Submitting your site to Google Webmaster Tool and Bing Webmaster

You first have to register for a Google webmaster tools account if you don’t already have one. You can use your existing Google credentials if you have a Gmail account. Once you are logged in you can add your Weebly website and then proceed to get a verification code. There are a number of ways you can get this code; via Google Analytics if you have an account, from your domain hosting company or generating an HTML tag from Google webmaster tools.

Step 2: Creating Weebly sitemap and submitting it to the Google search console

Without a sitemap, it will be more difficult for Google web crawlers to search for content on your site and index it. In view of its importance, Weebly automatically creates a sitemap for web designers who use it. You can review the sitemap Weebly makes for you by adding ‘/sitemap.xml’ to your website’s homepage URL.

Sitemap Submission

To add this sitemap to the Google search console you can follow the steps below:

1. Go to the URL google.com/webmasters/tools and then sign in.
2. If not signed up, get signed up and verify your Weebly website.
3. Under the ‘Sitemaps’ option under the ‘Crawl’ menu, click on ‘Add/Test Sitemap’.
4. After adding your website’s Sitemap URL into the text box provided, click ‘Submit’.

Yahoo and Bing have more or less the same steps for adding a sitemap. You might need to add your sitemap frequently to webmaster tools if your content is updated every day. If not, you can simply add your sitemap whenever you make a significant change to your site.

Add property to Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by the search engine giant to help website owners and webmasters get detailed information on the people visiting their website. Using this tool you can get a more accurate picture of the content on your site visitors like, rate at which clicks on product descriptions are converted into sales and which products are popular. You can also get information on which part of the world the majority of your visitors come from as well as detailed data on ecommerce sales.

How to get started on Google Analytics

1. If you don’t already have a Gmail account, sign up for a Google account which you will use for all Google services, including YouTube and Google+.
2. Follow the simple procedure to add your website’s URL along with some basic information about your site.
3. A block of code will be generated which you will need to add to your website.
4. As soon as you’re done with this, Google will begin tracking the required statistics on your site.

SEO settings in Weebly

Weebly site level SEO Settings

There are settings you can tweak in the Weebly backend to boost your SEO and make it easier for search engines to find. This can be done in three ways: settings that encompass the entire site, settings for individual pages and ‘other’ important settings.

There’s a lot you can do with the site-level SEO settings to get your pages high up the SERPs:

• Custom domain name: To help search engines locate your site more easily and give them an idea what it’s about, you can customize your domain name. You won’t be able to do this if you’re on the free tier of Weebly membership though. If you get even the most basic premium package, you will be able to remove ‘weebly’ from your domain address and instead plunk in a keyword or two.

Adding Custom Domain to Weebly

• Secured site: Still on your site’s URL, Weebly allows you to secure communications between your site and clients using Secure Socket Layer, or SSL technology. Essentially this protocol ensures all messages flowing between your site and visitors are encrypted, keeping them safe from eavesdroppers and potential man-in-the-middle attacks. Not only is SSL advisable from a security standpoint, it can help with SEO. Google and other search engines place websites with ‘https’ in their URLs higher in SERPs. Search engines aside, more and more web users are beginning to see the importance of safe browsing. They are thus more likely to interact with your website if it has ‘https’. If you will be using Weebly as your website builder, bear in mind that SSL only comes free if you subscribe to the business ecommerce pan.

Enabling SSL for Weebly

• Site title: Another setting Weebly allows you to tweak and optimize for search engines is your website’s title. Firstly, it gives you the option of having your site title displayed on top of each of your webpages in the form of a checkbox below the space for the title. Use the space to specify a title that incorporates the keywords you want to rank for instead of simply repeating the name of your brand or company. However, be careful not to stuff the title with keywords to the point Google suspects you of trying to fiddle with your SERP ranking.

Changing site title

• Social media share buttons: You can enable the Facebook sharing option to allow readers of your content to easily spread the word if they like it. This helps build organic traffic and increases chances of people wanting to link back to your webpages from other sites. In this way Weebly can indirectly contribute to your SEO.

Favicon: This feature is also not a direct contributor to your Weebly website’s SERP ranking, but it goes some way to increasing visibility. Some search engines show favicons in results pages, further adding to the visibility of a website.

In addition to these site-level settings that have an impact on SEO, there are other settings you can tweak to enhance the user experience for visitors. You can change mobile site settings which tell Weebly to automatically redirect people using mobile devices to a mobile-friendly version of your website. If you select a responsive theme, you won’t even need to change any settings to achieve this.

SEO tab settings

Below are the different areas in the SEO tab you can modify to make your Weebly website easier for web crawlers to find.

• Google Analytics: In the site-level settings’ footer code section, you can add analytics tracking code to get those vital traffic statistics.
• Webmaster tools: Paste the webmaster tools code from different search engines in the header section one by one to verify your site with them.

Weebly Seo Settings

• Site description: This option allows you to create a meta descriptions which search engines will display on the results page next to your link. Besides containing an enticing description of your website that appeals to visitors, a meta description is used by web crawlers to index your website.
• 301 redirects: In case you have updated the permalinks of your webpages in the course of adding new content, this Weebly feature allows the pages to keep their SERP ranking. In addition to this ensures that inbound links that point to your old pages don’t lead to the 404 error page.

301 redirects in weebly

Weebly SEO tab for pages

Here there are four settings you can change to enhance SEO for your Weebly website:

Add a page title: This feature offers you a field where you can give your webpage a title. Clever webmasters/web designers will sprinkle some keywords here without overstuffing them; remember you only have 57 characters to work with.

Input a page description: What is the page content about? This feature provides you a 180-character space to give readers a reason to click on your link in the search engine results page. This description should include some of your keywords or keyword phrases that you want to rank for.

Footer code: This is where you can paste code from Google Analytics to harvest traffic stats from your website. These will be useful in devising keywords that will optimize that particular webpage.

Header code: Here is where you will place the code from Google search console that will help gauge the visibility of the page on Google’s SERPs.

Hide this page: You can use this option to hide the webpage from search engines.

SEO Keyword Research for Weebly

Keyword research with KWFinder

KWFinder is a tool which most webmasters serious about search engine optimization are familiar with by now. This free online tool can help you find keywords within your chosen niche which have low competition, helping you get higher ranking for these words or phrases. Google Adwords does a similar function but it falls short in helping you know if the alternative keywords can rank quickly on SERPs.

Keyword difficulty score

A key statistic KWFinder offers in determining the speed with which your website can rank for keywords is keyword difficulty score. KWFinder gives you both local and global difficulty scores so you can drill down how well keywords rank in the country or city your website is based. The keyword difficulty statistics you get from KWFinder are real time, not cached from previous searches.

Kwfinder in Action

One of the metrics that goes into computing the SEO difficulty score is domain authority, or DA. This score, developed by Moz, tries to predict how well a website will rank in the SERPs based on its popularity. If your site is linked to by a number of high profile websites like Wikipedia, it will have a higher DA score. If it is a relatively new site with few inbound links, its DA will likely be lower than 10.

Another important metric KWFinder offers is accurate monthly keyword search volumes. The tool goes a step further to present search volumes for keywords that are closely related to each other.

Using SEMRush to research competitor rankings

SEMRush is an online digital marketing tool that provides website owners with an array of metrics they can use to drive traffic to their sites. This data is primarily about your competitors drawn from the most used online marketing channels. Depending on the level of subscription you have, you will have access to different tools. There is a free trial offered with all packages ranging from $70 to $550 per month.

Among the tools SEMRush offers to harvest competitor data are:

• Organic research: Using this feature you can get your competitors’ highest ranking keywords both on mobile and desktop. SEMRush will present its findings grouped according to the domain’s position in Google, Bing and other search engines. You will also be able to discover new organic competitors in the ever-expanding digital landscape. SEMRush will reveal their organic keywords and their traffic levels, helping you determine the effectiveness of their SEO.
• Advertising research: SEMRush will give you a fly-on-the-wall’s perspective of the competition’s advertising strategies, and even budget. You will be able to scrutinize their keywords as well as their ad copy to see what works. Whenever someone else begins ranking for the same keywords as you using Bing Ads or AdWords, SEMRush will let you know about it. This tool also enables you to localize your ad copy to make it more effective.
• Display advertising: This feature allows you to see the top advertisers and publishers ranked according to the number of ads in each online platform. The text vs media ratio on each of the platforms is displayed next to this statistic.
• Keyword research: With SEMRush you can find appropriate keywords for your SEO campaigns. In addition to the primary keywords, it will help you find related keywords, alternate keywords and long-tail keywords you can rank for to beat your competition. In determining how competitive your chosen keywords are, SEMRush helps you calculate keyword difficulty. You can even do side-be-side domain comparisons with competing domains to see common and unique keywords.

If you want to reach an international, cross-cultural audience, you can explore the multilingual options SEMRush offers.

• Backlinks: SEMRush allows you to do a thorough analysis of backlinks to evaluate the domain authority of the source sites as well as their geographic location.

Semrush in Action

Weebly Meta Keyword, SEO Post Title & On-Page Optimization

Adding keywords to title tag naturally

The importance of a title tag to a website’s SEO cannot be again said. It is one of the first things search engine bots see when crawling through the structure of your site. Over and above this, it is the headline web users see in the results page above the site’s URL. Having a good idea at a glance of what they are looking for will entice most web users to click on your link. Placing your keywords strategically in the title tag will help boost its rankings

To get the best out of your title tags, it advisable to create a custom tag for every page and blog post. Don’t simply cram keywords into the title tag in the hope of snaring web crawlers. Try and come up with a short, captivating sentence which describes what the page or post contains. Keep it below 60 characters so that it will not have to be truncated, losing meaning in the process.

Another handy tip is to ensure your site name does not automatically get appended to all title tags. You can achieve better SEO by unchecking the ‘Show title on top of your pages’ option in the Site Title settings under your Weebly website’s general settings.

How to write a good meta description

A meta description is that brief intro of a website’s content displayed below its URL in the search engine results pages. It is referred to by some as a ‘snippet’. This description is also seen by people who visitors to your site share pages on social media with.

A good meta description can be the difference between whether a web user clicks through your URL and whether they don’t. You therefore  need to make it as descriptive and captivating as possible. Here are some ways you can do so:

• Make sure the text is grammatically sound and reads well to human beings. Don’t succumb to the temptation to stuff it with keywords.
• Having said that, it is important that you include a few keywords or a keyword phrase you want to rank for in the meta description.
• Resist the urge to copy-paste the meta description for all your pages and posts. If you fail to write different meta descriptions for your pages Google will send you down the SERPs.
• Take care not to make your description too long. Keep it between 135 and 160 characters in length so as not to risk it being truncated by the search engine, leaving out your precious keywords.
• Much as your meta description is targeted at search engine crawlers, it should also be compelling to human readers. In fact it is advisable to write your meta description as if it were a commercial for your website or content.
• Try to use rich snippets and use schema markup to spice up these rich snippets.

Adding proper tags to sub-headings

Weebly, and any other website builder for that matter, allows you to break up your text with appropriate headings. These headings range from the main <h1> heading to the smallest <h6>. Good SEO practice recommends that you use <h1> only once in a webpage to tell the search engine what the page is about. You need to ensure your most important keywords are captured in this heading.

In Weebly you will notice that you are not allowed to create or modify <h1> tags for your webpages. This is a problem in terms of SEO as search engines rely on this tag as do human web users. If you don’t create your site’s <h1>, it will be listed as a problem in Bing Webmaster Tools SEO reports. Below is how you can circumvent this limitation imposed by Weebly:

1. From the top menu in the Weebly admin console click on ‘Theme’ and scroll down to ‘Edit HTML/CSS’.
2. On the left of the screen select HTML under ‘Header type’. In the div section of the code, paste the following: <div class=”h1-container”>
   <div class=”container”><h1 class=”h1-tag”>{h1-tag:text global=”false”}</h1></div>
   </div>
3. You can customize your <h1> header using corresponding code. For example, the below code allows you to change the casing and background color of your heading:

.h1-container {
background:#000; /* Changes the h1 tag’s background color */
}

.h1-tag .wsite-text { /* Customize your h1 tag’s text with this code */
text-transform:uppercase;
}

4. When you go back to the editor, you will see a place indicating ‘Click here to edit’. This is where you can input the words you want to appear as your heading.

To add subheadings from <h2> to <h6> on a webpage, repeat the above process only replacing <h1> with the subheading you wish to customize.

Naming and adding ‘alt’ to images

It is not unusual for images to be overlooked when it comes to web design and SEO. Savvy digital marketing executives and webmasters will not miss the opportunity to wring out the SEO potential of images. This potential can be realized by customizing the caption and alt tags of the images.

You can edit the alt text from the advanced image settings in the Weebly editor. Enter the text you want to appear (containing one or two keywords you want to rank for) in the space provided. The caption can be changed from the image settings.

Creating SEO-friendly permalinks

There are a number of ways to modify your permalinks in Weebly. For static webpages, go to the ‘Pages’ tab in the editor and select the page you wish to modify. Put in a title for the ‘Page name’ field. The text you input here will be used to form the URL of the page, only separated by hyphens, instead of space. So be careful to infuse some keywords in this page name. Bear in mind, though, that stuffing it with keywords to the extent it makes no sense to a human reader is also not advisable.

As for blog posts, you need to go to the Advanced options of the post editor and select ‘Permalink’ after you have published the post. By default, Weebly uses the title of the post to create its URL, but if this does not adequately capture your keywords, feel free to change it.

Product pages can also get customized, SEO-ready URLs. Go to ‘Products’ in the ‘Store’ tab and choose the product whose URL you wish to change. Click ‘Product permalink’. For the storefront, go to ‘Category permalink’ under the ‘Advanced’ settings of the page in question and input the words you would like to appear.

Off-Page SEO on Weebly

What are backlinks?

As the name suggests, they are simply links from other websites to yours. By now most website owners, web designers and webmasters are aware of the importance of many, quality backlinks to a website’s position on the SERPs. In Google’s view, the more the relevant backlinks to your site, the more useful it is to people seeking information in that topic. It views it as a gauge of the credibility of your website and the information presented in it.

What is white hat SEO?

Web designers, webmasters and online marketers engage in all manner of tactics to ensure their content ranks highly in the results pages of search engines. Some of these tactics are purely to boost SERP rankings and give little thought to the human reader of web content. White hat SEO shifts the focus from rising up the SERPs as fast as possible to creating quality content for human readers. Web experts are guided by a set of approved SEO techniques to help boost SERP rankings in a natural way. With Google revising its algorithm every now and then to nab and penalize low quality, keyword-stuffed content, it is wise to adopt white hat SEO.

Tracking Results on Your SEO on Weebly 

One of the popular tools used to keep track on how effective an SEO campaign is is SERPWatcher. This online tool allows you to keep track of several key statistics from a user-friendly interface. Among the key features of SERPWatcher are:

• Statistics including number of estimated visits to a page and top ranking pages
• Separate results for pages accessed via desktop and those accessed via mobile devices
• Keyword position flow and distribution
• Useful reports you can retrieve online
• Top ranking pages
• Integration with other SEO tools like KWFinder

Depending on the plan you choose you can keep track of between 200 and 1500 keywords.

How to track keywords using SERPWatcher

 You will first need to create an account on mangools.com. After signing up, sign in and click ‘Add new tracking’. To set up a new tracking, do the following:

1. Enter your domain.
2. Choose the country or city it is in
3. Select between mobile and desktop platforms
4. Enter the keywords you want to rank for and press ‘Start tracking’.

Serpwatcher in Action

Tracking page

To get to this page, click on ‘Trackings’ in SERPWatcher’s header area. Here you will find summarized information on all the domains a user is tracking. You can remove trackings, clone existing as well as add new trackings. The interface allows you to easily switch between desktop and mobile rankings.

The post Weebly SEO Ultimate Tutorial & Guide appeared first on Toronto SEO Expert.

Wix vs Weebly vs Squarespace

Setting up a website- be it a company site or a personal blog, is no longer the preserve of code-spewing techies. Lay web users- even those allergic to the sight of HTML tags, can be able to build their own websites. Key to this development has been the introduction and ever-increasing popularity of website builders. Platforms like WordPress allow you to build a site and manage your content but still demand a level of specialized skill.

Website builders don’t need you to understand the inner workings of a website at all. All you need to have is an idea of how your site should look and what it should do. While the WebSphere is literally awash with website builders, there are three which stand out: Weebly, Wix, and Squarespace.

Each of these has its own merits and demerits and, of course, it’s own pricing. You, therefore, need to have a good idea of what you want your website to achieve before you commit to any one website builder. To help you with that we did an in-depth comparison of Wix vs Weebly vs Squarespace, and below are the ultimate results of it.

Ease of use

Though every website builder claims to be the most intuitive, Wix truly lives up to the claim. You can literally drag and drop elements onto a page without having to go into the nitty-gritty of screen dimensions. While if you perform a Wix vs Weebly comparison then you will that though Weebly offers the drag-and-drop functionality in its editor, it is limited to certain areas. This may seem a limitation at the time, but it allows you to change your templates later without losing your content.

Weebly Editor

The intuitiveness of the Wix editor comes at a price; you will not be able to change your templates in future when the need arises. Not allowing users to edit CSS templates is one of Wix’s key drawbacks.

Also as compared to Weebly, the Wix editor has the title to every widget hidden, while same is not the case with Weebly, where you can clearly see the name of the widget even without hovering on it.

Wix Editor

Squarespace barely figures in the usability stakes with an interface that takes a bit of technical nous to effectively use. If you are expecting a similar Drag and Drop widgets interface, then Squarespace is going to disappoint you. Though it is a Visual WYSIWYG editor, if we perform a Wix vs Squarespace comparison or a Weebly vs Squarespace comparison, then the developers of Squarespace fails at some points.

Squarespace Editor

Design features

It is in design that Squarespace shines brightest. From the wealth of aesthetically pleasing templates this platform offers, you can see that design is the center of their focus. Built using the latest CSS, JavaScript, and HTML tools, these templates are not only pleasing to the eye, they are search engine-optimized.

Your target audience will have an easier time finding your website, and they will like what they see. Even webmasters accessing the backend to update the website will love the look and feel of the interface. The cherry on top is that Squarespace makes templates that are mobile-friendly, a key attribute in this age of mobile convergence.

If there’s one flaw that can be picked out from Squarespace template design is that it perhaps is too reliant on high-resolution images. If you don’t have matching pictures to replace the ones in the Squarespace templates, the look of your site might not be what you imagined.

Which is not to say Weebly is a non-starter when it comes to design. They do offer sexy, mobile-ready templates that will rank well on search engine results pages. But it’s clear to see that the emphasis is substance rather than style.

Weebly templates

So where does Wix figure in the design stakes? Wix boasts more than 500 template designs for you to choose from and their design has improved vastly over the past year. However, they do not offer the flexibility of other website builders; you won’t be able to customize the templates to your liking.

Flexibility

Which brings us nicely to our next point of the Squarespace vs Weebly vs Wix comparison. We’ve seen Wix templates are not as flexible as some would like in terms of design. But in terms of functionality, the makers of Wix have some goodies up their sleeve.

You can add a number of functionalities to your site via the Wix App Market. Through these add-ons, you can integrate a blog, email marketing and client invoicing, among other features, to your site. Experts, however, argue that these apps are not truly integrated into the site.

Wix App Market

Weebly offers users the option to add custom code to a page to improve functionality or make it look better. So you’re not limited to what the template has to offer. This is in addition to a raft of built-in features that will serve the needs of most businesses and individuals looking to create websites.

What lets Weebly down from a flexibility standpoint is how hard it is to move your site to another platform when you choose to do so. Whereas Weebly gives you the option to export your pages zipped, moving your content will prove a challenge.

Weebly add-On tools

Squarespace has a developer platform that allows you to code features and functions onto your website beyond the WYSIWYG interface. But everything is built in, including the features that Wix offers through apps.

The most important functionalities are developed in-house by Squarespace and made available through its templates so you don’t have to go looking for third-party apps, worrying whether they are compatible.

SEO

As we mentioned earlier, Squarespace has made a deliberate effort to not only beautify its templates but also to optimize them for search engines. However, this support for SEO is limited and you only get the option to add the meta description.

Squarespace Seo Settings

Built on AJAX, Wix is not built for both Google and Bing web crawlers to easily locate. They have on-page tools to help with SEO, but these are not easy for non-technical users to utilize.

Wix SEO Settings

Weebly in terms of offering SEO setting doesn’t come up with too much technical stuff. Under the Seo settings option, you get to add the Seo descriptions and meta descriptions for the page, options to add the header and footer codes ( good option to easily integrate google analytics, and the last option to add the 301 redirections.

Weebly Seo Settings

Marketing features

Marketing is one of the weak points of Squarespace. Apart from social media share buttons and URL redirect tools, this platform has few features to help you draw visitors to your website. The ones available require workarounds.

Weebly allows you to add basic custom marketing features to your website through its HTML editor. However, it is limited when it comes to adding advanced marketing features such as customized email collection tools and customized social media sharing. This is down to the fact that it does not give users root or FTP access to server files

Technical support

With Wix, you don’t need to go far to get help in case of an issue as you can get all answers you need on the Wix knowledgebase. If you really need to talk to an expert you can reach their support team via email tickets or phone. There is also a forum where you can get all the help you need.

Squarespace has all of the above support channels apart from a phone line. This has been effectively replaced by a live chat that’s available 24/7, which trumps a telephone line only available during working hours. Despite the absence of a phone contact, Squarespace is known to offer the best response time.

Weebly offer phone support and some customers praise the responsiveness of their support agents.

Pricing structure

Though the three website builders have different ways of pricing their offerings, a Wix vs Weebly vs Squarespace comparison based on time and features reveals Squarespace as the most expensive option.

  Squarespace Pricing Options

You could argue that this is based on real value but if yours is a short-term project, you had better consider going with Wix. They have a free tier available to those who don’t mind the URL ending with .wix.com. But even their premium plans are competitively priced if you won’t be running the site for long.

Wix pricing

Weebly, who also has a free tier, offers great value and their prices are a bit lower than Squarespace. Another advantage this platform wields over Squarespace is that it has fewer caps on features than Squarespace. If you own a small or medium-sized business, Weebly’s pricing will make sense to you.

Weebly Pricing Options

Conclusion

When considering which website builder between the three to use for your website, bear in mind what you need vis-à-vis your budget. All three website builders are highly functional and have graphics that will appeal to your visitors.

However, Squarespace is the best option in terms of aesthetics, whereas Weebly provides the best functionality. If you want just a basic site for the short-term, the free tier Weebly and Wix offer might be the best option.

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One of the greatest advantages of choosing WordPress from all the other CMS systems is that once you set up your WP site you instantly have access to an enormous range of plugins (There are over 44 thousand of different plugins by now!). They can help you build a more functional website, improve your visibility in search engines or even boost your site performance.

With those many plugins there it might be a bit of a challenge to find the most important ones. Having too many unnecessary plugins might actually decrease your site performance. You have to be careful here and only implement plugins you really need.

In this article, you will find the brief summary of the TOP 8 Free WordPress plugins to guide you through the world of WordPress. They are easy to install, easy to use and will help you take your WordPress site to the whole new level.

1. Yoast SEO – The #1 WordPress SEO plugin

If you are serious about your SEO this plugin comes in handy. It’s not only the most popular SEO plugin there but also must-have for any WordPress site. It’s especially great for SEO newbies as it simplifies your SEO tasks and provides you with a whole range of tips and suggestions to help you rank high in Google.

Here is a brief overview of how you can use Yoast SEO to boost your organic traffic:

Optimise your appearance in the search results – Snippet preview

Yoast SEO snippet preview functionality not only makes it easy for you to edit your titles and meta descriptions but also provides you with the instant feedback by displaying how your site will actually look when finding in Google. This can be really handy when you try to optimise your site for the CTR – Click through rate (which isn’t a bad idea as Google does consider it as a ranking factor).

Use Index/noindex functionality

Do you have tons of duplicate pages on your site? Maybe you do A/B tests? If that’s the case you don’t necessarily want Google to index all of your pages.

Having all your pages indexed might cause confusion for search engines (they simply don’t know which of the duplicate pages to display in search results). In some cases, your website can even get penalized for spammy practices!

Fortunately, with Yoast SEO index/noindex functionality you can easily set a noindex attribute to any page without going to the robts.txt file. You can even also add a canonical URL without editing any code!

Generate a sitemap

Do you want to make sure that all your pages are reachable by GoogleBots? Help them – generate an XML sitemap! This Yoast SEO plugin has the most intuitive XML Sitemaps functionality ever. All you have to do is to check the box and Yoast SEO plugin will generate a sitemap for you – It’s that easy.

2. WP Fastest Cache – Performance Enhancement plugin

In 2016 Google webmaster team officially confirmed that Google considers page load speed as a ranking factor in their algorithm. The measure of how fast your site loads not only determines your rankings but also has a huge impact on your conversion rate. It was measured that every second delay implies 7% drop in sales.

That being said you probably want your site loads faster. WP Fastest Cache is a great caching plugin that does just that. It can significantly decrease your load time and as a result, lower your bounce rate, help you rank higher and drive more sales. Not only caching, it also has the options to minify CSS and js files.

How big decrease can you expect? That depends on many factors such as your website code, size and if you are already using a caching plugin. But to give you an idea of what to expect here is an example: I recently installed and activated WP Fastest Cache plugin on my website and my average page load time dropped from about 1.1s to just 0.7s. That’s 36% decrease in page load time achieved in under two minutes (that’s how long it takes to install and activate a plugin)!

3. All in one Migration – Export/Import plugin

Migrating your WordPress site along with all the images, posts and videos might take forever. Right? Not with All in one Migration plugin! This intuitive plugin provides an incredibly easy and reliable migration solution to help you save your time and possibility even avoid a headache. Migrating your WordPress site has never been easier but if you are a beginner there is also a step-by-step video provided to navigate you through the process.The great thing is even if you are not migrating, you can use it as a backup tool and save your backups to Amazon S3, Google Drive, Local storage and at many other places.

4. Akismet – Spam protection for WordPress

Deleting all the spammy comments is not only time consuming but also boring. If you are a webmaster you better spend your time optimizing your site rather than reading through comments looking for the non-spammy ones. Akismet is a great tool to help you automatically filter out all the spam comments and save your time. It does its job by checking every comment against Akismet global database of spam preventing your site from publishing malicious content.

5. WP Smush – Image compression and optimization

Do you have a lot of high-quality images on your site? Well, if you don’t you should probably consider adding some – They are great for SEO.

Apart from increasing your rankings images also increase your site size causing it to load much longer. We already showed that page load speed matters so it seems like we are facing a problem here. How can you possibly have all those great images but at the same time keep your page size as small as possible?

Here is when a WP Smush plugin comes in handy. It’s a compression plugin that cuts all the unnecessary data and significantly decreases the size of your images. If you have tons of uncompressed images it can be a game changer for your site performance. The WP Smush use lossless compression meaning that it just reduces the size of an image without affecting its quality!

6. Contact Form 7 – Form submission plugin

How easy it is for your users to contact you? This commonly used plugin enrich your website with a  form submission functionality.

It lets you add highly customizable form submissions on your pages. All you have to do is to customize the form so that it does its job and you are ready to add it whenever you want on your site simply by pasting the shortcode generated by Contact Form 7 plugin.

7. Shortcode Ultimate – Collection of shortcodes

This plugin really simplifies things. It has a collection of 50 shortcodes that you can use to add a variety of visual and functional elements to your pages.

By using Shortcode Ultimate plugin you can create buttons, boxes, sliders and responsive videos in a matter of minutes. It’s another time-saving plugin you should start using now!

8. WPS Hide Login – Logging hiding plugin

Are you concern about your site security? If you are a webmaster you probably want your site to be safe, don’t you?

Fortunately, there is a simple way to increase your site security. That is to hide your logging page from others. If someone can’t find your logging page how can he possibly guess the password? He can’t! WPS Hide Login plugin does just that. It lets you create a custom URL for your logging page to hide it from others and fell a bit more confident about your site security.

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