There has been a little bit of a churn regarding Typogram Blog lately. We had switched platforms a few times and wasted a lot of time in the process. My co-founder and I decided to solve this once and for all.
Previously, we had different priorities when making blogging platform decisions - ease of use to edit posts and onboard audiences.
Previous Priorities
Good Editor Experience
We wanted an easy-to-use editor. Writing content is already "hair-consuming" as it is. Ideally, we would like not to battle with a difficult editor and worry about formatting when we write. I will get hate for this, but having markdown support is not enough. I should be able to drag an image into the editor to insert it. I should be able to paste a URL onto selected text and make it into a link.
Newsletter Sign-Up Form
Growing our audience is the ultimate goal, so having a newsletter sign-up form is important. If the sign-up form can be integrated with the blog and is easy to use, that would save us a lot of time.
What We Used Previously
With these two criteria, we found substack and hashnode. Both of them supported custom domains, so we set these up:
blog.typogram.co (powered by hashnode)
fontdiscovery.typogram.co (powered by substack)
But upon SEO research, we found out these subdomain blogs are not contributing to the SEO ranking for the main site typogram.co. Google search engine treats subdomain website as its own with SEO ranking separate from the root domain. It made sense when we consider the WordPress scenario: if subdomain and root domain are considered as the same, then the best thing we can do for SEO is to use wordpress.com to set up blogs under subdomains like typogram.workpress.com to inherit the excellent authority score of the main site — too good to be true.
The best practice for SEO is to host a blog in a subdirectory like typogram.co/blog. Unfortunately, neither substack nor hashnode supports hosting in a subdirectory. Furthermore, substack doesn't support adding canonical URL, which is essential for SEO.
If you enjoy this series, you can subscribe here: