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website and s.e.o.

My website is built using squarespace, and whilst squarespace is (in my experience) great, it occurred to me that should the company one day cease trading, it’s not impossible that my website could vanish with it and so, for peace of mind i decided i needed to get organised and sort all the photos and text on my website into an organised backup.

At the same time, i realised i also needed to sort out my website’s seo. Now, for those who are unfamiliar with seo (search engine optimisation), it involves ensuring your site loads quickly and is easily NAVIGABLE by search engine bots - and let me tell you, it can be very time consuming! particularly if you’re manually Retro-fitting your website.

in my case i needed to Resize, Reduce the file size, rename and provide alt text for all of the images on my site, of which there are many! I also used a couple of free trials of seo tools (semrush Was particularly impressive) to route out broken links, missing headings etc. etc.

Overview page from semrush’s site audit. Site health 90% - i’ll take that, for now at least.

Unfortunately there do seem to be some things that can’t be sorted out to seo’s maximum satisfaction owing to the way squarespace organises its programming, for example using lightbox on images (where an image opens in a temporary window when clicked) appears not be to seo’s taste for whatever (i’m sure perfectly good, though slightly frustrating) reason.

There’s Still much to do - I need a bunch more text in my product descriptions and must incorporate my newly researched keywords. I also need to work on obtaining backlinks (where other sites link to mine) and then there’s the not inconsiderable task of preparing the pictures and text for the 85% of my work i’ve yet to add to my site - But, i am a heck of a lot closer than i was before and it’s one more tick in the process of slowly bringing this stuff together. Onwards and upwards! As someone once said.