I don’t know how they do it, but Squarespace never ceases to amaze me when it comes to SEO.
Before switching over in September ’08, I hosted my blog on WordPress which seemed to be the de facto standard for serious bloggers. After befriending some internet marketers, I read up on numerous articles, blogs, and e-books on how to best optimize my blog for search engines – essentially, how to “trick” Google into placing my posts at the top of targeted search queries.
I re-worded my titles and posts. I tried my best to utilize meta tags and keywords to my best advantage. I installed numerous SEO plugins.
It wasn’t all for naught. I saw some improvement in traffic; I’ll grant you that.
However, just a short while after switching to Squarespace, my traffic improved drastically…and kept growing. I must acredit some of this growth to Facebook, Twitter, and internet friends (thanks for the link love!). However, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the largest percentage of my traffic increase stemmed from search engine queries.
Just yesterday, I wrote a post about the possiblity of a The Office Monopoly game. Today, less than 24 hours after writing the post, my little blog comes up as the third hit on Google when you search “the office monopoly” – out of 3,270,000 hits.
Here’s another example from a post I wrote last year, titled Top Ten PantoneĀ® Inspired Products. When you search for “pantone products,” this page comes up as the fourth hit on Google:
Now, with the massive weight that the Pantone name has on the world of designers, I can’t help but feel a bit giddy about this.
I know that the first rule of thumb when it comes to SEO is to write good content. And perhaps the quality of my content has improved since I made the switch. However, looking at the timing of my traffic records, I cannot help but credit at least some of my search engine rankings to the clean XHTML that is generated by Squarespace.
For more on Squarespace and SEO, read:
What are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services?
Are spiders ignoring my site because of < insert mythical SEO practice >?
have been hearing bad things about squarespace and SEO work!
Kudos to Squarespace on all your hard work!