headers gonna H
one of the best and worst things about squarespace for beginners is the level of customization features it has. this is great because it allows you to get really creative on a granular level with your site–but unfortunately, if you don’t have the background knowledge of some simple SEO basics guiding your design, that means you might be making some little mistakes here and there that are actually holding your site back without even knowing it.
the good news is, because there are so many customization features available with squarespace, almost all of them have an easy fix.
today we’re gonna guide you through a quick and simple way to make sure you’re using your header fonts for maximum SEO optimization, without having to sacrifice your design.
a lot of people don’t realize that the different header fonts are actually built for different SEO purposes, so first thing to know is what the main 3 header fonts do for SEO. let me explain:
heading one (H1) tells search engines what your page is about, so you only want this to occur once per page
heading two (H2) can be used more frequently, but should only be used to break up the big sections or chapters of your page that folks would be searching for
heading 3 (H3) is what you’ll use to guide website visitors through those sections without overwhelming them with huge blocks of text
if you’ve had squarespace automatically generate the size of your header fonts, (which most folks do!), then you likely want to use your H1s and H2s in other areas where it isn’t optimal for your SEO. But don’t worry–there’s an easy work around to get the same look without confusing search engines and sacrificing your website’s SEO.
what you’re going to be using is the squarespace “scale text” function, which takes a highlighted block of text and scales it to the size of the block that it’s within. so you can take an H2 (or H3, etc.), highlight it and make it the full size of the text block that it’s within to give the illusion that it’s an H1, without confusing search engines on what that page is actually about.
one thing to note when you’re doing this–when you have a text block that covers multiple lines, you’ll need to do something called a “soft break."
this is when you hit shift + enter to break up the lines of text, rather than just hitting enter. what that does is ensures the lines of text stay scaled at the same size, rather than proportionally to the size of the lines they take up.
if this sounds confusing explained in an email, we also have a video showing exactly how we do this on our youtube channel (and on our instagram if you follow us there)! you can watch it below.
was this helpful? are there any other squarespace bits and bobs you're looking for help with? we'd be happy to make a video or a guide to walk you through it! let us know :)
