What does Squarespace do for SEO?

How does Squarespace compare to various other services with respect to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Squarespace sites come completely optimized for SEO out of the box without you having to do anything at all. A quote from the CEO of SEOmoz, the web's most respected SEO community:

(You will also notice that Squarespace is in the screenshot on the front page of SEOmoz)

Further, as a technical summary:

1. Squarespace produces pages with clean HTML markup.
2. You have full control over the ordering of your page titles, even down to being able to create different title schemes for your homepage vs item pages and collection pages (done via General Settings).
3. Squarespace automatically generates and links a proper sitemap.xml, which enumerates every single URL on your site, with proper priority, for perfect indexing even if you use a Javascript heavy template.
4. We generate proper meta tags for all pages.
5. We generate proper tags to associated RSS feeds for your pages.
6. We automatically generate a correct robots.txt, link your sitemap, and exclude all Squarespace service/search endpoints.
7. Image descriptions are converted to alt tags properly.
8. All primary pages on your Squarespace site contain clean URLs that are easily indexed and read.
9. Squarespace generates proper rel="canonical" tags that ensure search engines are picking up the proper versions of your pages when content exists at more than one URL.
10. Given multiple domains, Squarespace will redirect users and search engines to the right domain and use rel="canonical" to fix these references.
11. Squarespace generates proper Facebook open graph tags that are used when your links are shared on social services.
12. Squarespace is a paid service that aggressively fights spam. If you are using a free service that is a target for spammers, you potentially run the risk of being falsely grouped with other spam sites.

Even more, when importing from various systems, we ensure your URLs match after moving to Squarespace so that your already ranked content doesn't lose rank when you switch over. Your rank may even improve greatly, due to the items listed above. We've seen this happen frequently.

What about blog pages though? There's a discussion here where some folks aren't happy with blog SEO (whether they are right i dont know) https://answers.squarespace.com/questions/16806/how-do-i-add-meta-description-on-blog-posts

"We generate proper tags to associated RSS feeds for your pages."

I was wondering if you could clarify this, does this mean that Squarespace changes local links to absolute links when a blog is fed through RSS?

Thank you.

Amazing Answer! Thank YOU!

Also, check this statement from CEO of Moz.com:http://moz.com/community/q/seo-and-squarespace-is-this-really-an-option

The purpose of the Answers community is to provide relevant solutions for questions about the Squarespace platform. For more information on the posting guidelines please review the FAQ here. I am going to remove this answer as subjective.

That said, if you have specific feedback for Squarespace, you can let Squarespace know directly here.

I'll same problem! Solved thanks acasalena!