Squarespace SEO Philosophies

Last week four Squarespace enthusiasts — designer/developer Alan Houser, author of Squarespace for Dummies Kris Black, non-profit podcaster Ed Lucas and yours truly — opined about search engine optimization (SEO) strategies for Squarespace in areas such as indexation, social media SEO, and SEO keyword selection using the new Google+ Hangouts on Air. Today, you can catch all the important details or watch the re-broadcast.

If you have the time, you can watch the entire episode on our YouTube channel (don't forget to subscribe). Or, catch the highlights below. Also, contact me if you'd like to be a part of the next Hanging Out and Talking Squarespace on Thursday, July 26th. Our topic will be "quick and dirty design tips."

Highlights from Squarespace and SEO Hangout

The Hangout on Thursday, June 28th was full of perspective due to a dynamic group composition consisting of a non-profit expert and podcaster, a two developer designers, and marketer. The differing viewpoints provided for a rich conversation around several important topics:

• Indexing on Squarespace - The group discussed the SEO implications of using Squarespace's built-in search engine indexation options, as well as the ever-popular SEO issues that can result from having an active yourusername.squarespace.com subdomain in addition to your custom domain.
• Social Media and SEO on Squarespace - Next up the quad covered using extra HTML snippets for social media sharing buttons on Squarespace and what Squarespace will likely do around social sharing as a part of the upcoming Squarespace 6. They also talked about using Schema.org microformating to control the image and text snippet that is shared on social networks such as Facebook and Google+ in status updates.
• Keyword Selection and SEO - Perhaps the most interested portion of the Hangout was the discussion around SEO keyword selection on Squarespace websites. Spoiler alert: a good publication also makes for a solid user experience and supports a major chunk of any solid long-term SEO strategy.

Contact me if you'd like to be a part of the next Hanging Out and Talking Squarespace on Thursday, July 26th. Our topic will be "quick and dirty design tips."

Squarespace Website Show & Tell: June 2012

It's time for the June Squarespace Website Show & Tell! Each month we call out to all Squarespace designers are ask for their latest work in an effort to help showcase the talent in the community and to inspire you in your own web design endeavors.

Learn from and enjoy their work, and don't forget to submit your work for July's Show & Tell.

June Squarespace Website Show & Tell

We had eight brand spankin' new websites submitted by seven excellent designers in the Squarespace community during the month of June. 

• LiveLetter is an online marketing company with a great lead generation website created by our friend and frequent contributor to the Show & Tell, Shane Boyce of Boyce Design.
• Launch Farm is a boutique branding agency out of Ohio that helps brands cultivate and curate content and with social media. Founder and Principal Christian Deuber submitted his site to us.
• Incentives to Grow Consulting asked our friend Tony Ham to build a new home for their brand online. He built this beaut of a site for them.
• Simpson Yacht Sales is a small business website in the business of selling yachts. Owner Chris Simpson is an entrepreneur who found a great web platform in Squarespace to meet the needs of his growing business.
• WorldCaptured is a group of young adults who built their website to showcase their work in entertainment, photography, and filmmaking. Group founder Jordan Stauber is also their web designer.
• Stuart Smith is an LA-based designer from the UK who also happens to be a senior designer for Disney Publishing Worldwide. 
• Wade Creative is the brand of graphic and web designer and branding professional Steve Wade. Check out the great look of his Squarespace website.
• BloodHub marks the first an only company that specializes in the recruitment, collections, manufacturing and testing of blood. Shane Boyce of Boyce Design submits this unique specimen this month.

Which is your favorite website from the month and what do you like about it? Or, is there a feature of a particular website that you want to know how to create? Leave your comments below, and make sure to submit your work for July's Show & Tell by filling out the form on the right side of the blog. 

(Don't have Squarepace website yet? Check out this review.)

How to Build a Great Blog, by Choice

Success is less about being lucky, but more about what you do to take advantage of the luck you get. This is one of the many insightful findings Jim Collins and his team of researchers discovered about great companies in the book, Great By Choice. Turns out, much of what it takes to build a great company applies equally well to building a great blog. Learn what it takes to build a great blog, by choice.

Elements of Greatness

Collins and his research partners defined success as companies who beat their industry competitors on average by a factor of 10. Their research showed that all of these companies shared three essential behaviors: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Let's apply these concepts to blogging as way of understanding them:

• Fanatic Discipline - This habit is all about having a purpose for your blog and being utterly relentless in your pursuit of this goal. If you want to have the best blog on a given topic, you need to be mono-maniacal in your consistent approach to publishing great content in that area. It also means having discipline in setting up goals to measure against your objectives, and then measuring your output against these goals.
• Empirical Creativity - Demonstrating this behavior entails not looking just to best practice examples or case studies for what to do with your blog, but moreso to evidence, direct observation and practical experiments in tandem with bold creative initiatives to define what works for you. Test things out constantly, and double down on the stuff that works.
• Productive Paranoia - Being great means never getting too comfortable. Productive paranoia is about staying hyper vigiliant and attuned to new tastes and threats in your industry. It also means having safety measures built in. Don't rely on just one source of traffic, and build relationships with your audience to future-proof your readership.

Great By Choice focused on the greatness of companies such as Southwest Airlines, Microsoft (during the Bill Gates era), and Progressive Insurance. And while none of these companies relied on a blogging to achieve greatness, the same might not be true for the companies of the future.

Instituting the habits of fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia into your blogging will help bring your blog from so-so to greatness, and in the process it might just do the same for your business.

Have you read Great By Choice? Either way, what do you think of the elements of greatness as described in this post?

Image credit: Flickr

Disqus and Squarespace Comments Together at Last

Anyone with a Squarespace blog will tell you that, traditionally, the Squarespace commenting system has left something to be desired. Luckily, Squarespace 6 will bring an end to clunky captas and limited commenting options. Not only will Squarespace offer a completely revamped commenting system to accompany their new platform launch, but they'll also be introducing a one-click integration with the popular commenting system, Disqus.

Installing Disqus on a Squarespace 6 Blog

Installing Disqus on a Squarespace blog has always been possible with a little tweaking, but now it couldn't be easier with Squarespace 6. The first thing you need to do is register your blog and create an account on Disqus. It's a simple process. Then, enter your Disqus Shortname for your blog in the corresponding field in the General Settings of Squarespace 6. That's it. Squarespace is going out of their way to make it easy to have an amazing blog or website with powerful features and extensibility. 

Seemless Disqus Integration with Squarespace 6

I recently tried out the new Disqus comments on Squarespace 6 on my KoiStory.com blog about koi fish. I have to say that I'm impressed so far. Squarespace pulled in Disqus without any effort on my part after simply pasting in my Disqus Shortname.

What do you think about the new Squarespace 6 and Disqus comments integration? I've started publishing on KoiStory.com, despite Squarespace's warning that everything is still in beta. I guess it's my way of wanting to use the new platform. Do extra features like one-click Disqus integration make it seem worth the wait? 

Squarespace 6: Multiple Authors and Community Blogs

Squarespace has always supported multiple content publishers and editors per each website on the current version of their web publishing platform. That said, Squarespace support for multiple authors hasn't always been as comprehensive as it could be. Squarespace 6 promises new functionality for blogs and websites with community authorship. Take an exclusive look at how Squarespace has simplified permissions and beefed up support for member profiles.

Streamlined Support for Multiple Editors

Squarespace has always done a decent job of providing multiple levels of permissions and access to a website. According to Brandon Davenport, founder of the popular multi-author tech blog, Okay Geek (and co-host on the unofficial Squarespace podcast, Content, Structure & Style):

"The Squarespace system has been spot on when it comes to managing larger teams of people. You can easily create different “audiences” which contain a set of specific permissions. These could be things like which pages are visible or different editing capabilities for certain authors. You can then assign specific people to an audience and give each person the abilities attached to the assigned audience."

The new interface for creating editors appears to be much more streamlined than what is currently in Squarespace v5. Contributors are created based on the major groups of tasks on your website, not by each grouping individual permissions together one-by-one. 

By the looks of things, Squarespace has been listening to its customers' feedback. Roles created specifically for billing, administration, and even comment moderation will simplify the task of defining permissions for multiple editors on a website.

Creating Rich Member Profiles on Squarespace 6

Squarespace currently supports multiple authors on Squarespace blogs and websites, but customers have been pushing Squarespace to add more social features and profile information. Davenport commented,

"Something that threw us a curve ball was profiles. We really wish we could have a profile page for each of our editors that they would be able to edit and build upon (add bios, photos and social networks)."

Squarespace 6 brings robust new features and controls to highlight editorial staff and provide greater opportunities for their recognition, enagement, and the growth of your blog's community.

Squarespace will now support custom avatars for editors right out-of-the-box. Your authors will also have the ability create a custom profile and attach their social media profiles to their Squarespace profiles. I'm not sure about photos, or how robust the profile pages will be, but the new features will be welcome additions.

Squarespace even seems to be exploring the relationship between authors and location. With the new location tab, authors can share their home base with your audience. It's exciting to see Squarespace push their platform to the limits of how people are using their websites today and into the future.

The social web is about creating greater opportunities for personalization and engagement. The new profile and permissions features contained in Squarespace 6 will provide greater opportunities in these areas for community blog/websites with multiple authors. What features are you hoping to see for Squarespace user profiles in version 6?