Website Squadron SEO Guide
The best place to get started with SEO, is reading the Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.
Below is all we know about SEO at Website Squadron. This text is a work in progress, so it’s not really all all we know…
Below, you will find a long list of topics regarding SEO, with one or four sentences, and a definition here and there.
If you want to learn about SEO, you have come to the right page. If there is a topic you want more detail about, please check out FAQ.
To utilize our time efficiently, spending as much time and money as possible on the factors that have the greatest impact first makes sense.
SEMRUSH came up with a study called Ranking Factors [SEMRUSH Study]. This study gives you the impact of specific tasks on ranking. SEMRUSH wants you to buy their software, so they use this study to show that “Text Relevance” is the most critical factor.
They give “Text Relevance” a 0.47 out of 5.29, close to 10%. If you wrote content embarrassing Shakespeare, you would only get there one-tenth of the way.
To rank a web page, your website and web pages need to have good content, good Technical SEO, and good backlinks.
Website Squadron, in disbelief of what anyone says, has conducted our test, which can be found when searching in Google for “Is David Quaid Correct?”. In this test, we have better “text relevance” by far, whereas David had a title, a YouTube video, and a domain with higher authority, i.e., more backlinks.
In SEO, content should be text-relevant and answer the searcher’s question. Text relevance refers to how well a web page matches a user’s searches.
When a user enters a query into a search engine, it analyzes the keywords and their intent. The search engine will then check various pages to find their similarity to the query. In time, if the text on your web page is relevant, search engines will rank you higher.
Some key points about text relevance include:
To rank higher in search engines, make your content as relevant as possible to answer the user’s query. Then you are 10% of the way.
They determine how your page is presented to potential visitors, impacting both the click-through rate and the overall user engagement.
While they involve on-page optimization and some technical considerations, they primarily focus on making your listing as appealing and informative as possible to encourage users to click through to your content.
Backlink factors are the most critical component of SEO. They help determine the authority and trustworthiness of a website’s domain and individual web pages of a website.
A domain can accumulate domain authority—a metric that predicts how well the entire website will perform in search rankings—based on the quality and quantity of its backlinks.
A single web page can build its authority if it earns high-quality links from reputable, relevant sources. These backlinks act as endorsements, signaling to search engines that the content is valuable and trustworthy, boosting overall rankings and visibility.
The other factors like User Experience Factors, User Signals, and URL and Domain Factors combined have such a low impact that they should be the last topics that one looks at in order to rank a web page.
There are several ways to track a website or a web page’s rank in search engines. The more popular, free and relieable sources are Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Google Search Console (GSC) enables website owners to monitor, maintain, and optimize their site’s presence in Google Search results.
If you want to learn about SEO, you have to get very familiar with what everything means in GSC. Let’s take an example: click; what exactly does a click mean?
Where did the click come from? Did it come from Social Media, organic search or Google Ads? Are only organic search clicks counted? Not so simple… clicks… And the same goes for impressions.
Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools is an SEO platform that provides insights, keyword research, and performance data to help website owners improve their site’s visibility and ranking on Bing search results. It has relevance to ChatGBT.
In GSC, a “click” is recorded when a user selects your website’s link from the search results page, in order to go to your website.
Not every click is reported in GSC because Google applies privacy thresholds and data aggregation techniques (including sampling and rounding) to protect individual user privacy—especially for low-volume queries.
The image below illustrates that:
SEO Agencies can be found all over the planet, and it’s a good idea to consider hiring a local SEO agency if you are in the market for one. Take NfiniteLimits as an example.
They deliver cutting-edge SEO and web development services that drive measurable results for Chicago businesses ready to dominate online. As an SEO agency in Chicago, they help many clients achieve an average 150% increase in organic traffic within six months through data-driven strategies combining technical optimization, responsive web design, and Core Web Vitals expertise.
Their decade of experience and proven track record include transparent reporting, guaranteed results within 90 days, and dedicated support to ensure their customers’ websites rank for high-converting keywords while delivering exceptional user experiences.
Organic search results match a search in a search engine, but are not paid for ads.
oEmbed is a protocol that allows embedding content from one website into another by simply providing a URL, and you can find more details in the oEmbed documentation.
Indexing is the process by which search engines store and organize web pages in their database to make them retrievable for user searches.
The general consensus is that page titles should be maximum 60 characters.
Every SEO plugin you install on WordPress, including SEOPress, will give so sort of red message when the title goes over that.
However, there is a school of thought amongst the SEO community that page titles could be as long as 220 words and that one should not fear the eucalyptus (those 3 dots at the end of the title). Whatever one loses in aesthetics, one gains in ranking. We will test this, and should this be true, document it here.
Schema is a language designed to help search engine understand the content of your web page, which allows them to index your content more thoroughly and display your content to your intended audience. Schema enables the searcher to see rich snippets in his or her search results.
Snippets are the descriptive text you see below a search result.
SEOPress is a SEO plugin for WordPress. It is lightweight and won’t break the bank, does not inundate the user with annoying upsell, and has a lot of powerful features.
Organic listings are ranked by the search engine’s algorithm based on relevance and quality.
Paid results are marked as “Ad” or “Sponsored”.
Local results (map pack) is a section showing nearby businesses related to the query, under Places.
You cannot control Off Page SEO.
They consist of link building, content marketing, Local SEO Google Business Profile and Citations, Social Media and Review.
The key to SEO success is creating content for “linkreators”.
Linkreators are people that run websites in your industry, or, a related industry.
Not all the content on your site should be dedicated to them, but, you have to create some content specifically for them.
To cater to linkreators, create topics that cates to the “next best thing”.
There is a big difference between content that gets shared on social media, and content that gets linked to.
Social shares or signals, do not affect rankings.
Without any links, you have very little change to rank on Google’s first page.
You can find linkreators in search engines, using informational keywords, that should show up news sites, or blogs. Take the top 10 to 20 sites you find, and add them to your list of linkreators.
If you are in an industry that does not have bloggers, build lists that are the “best of…” or “top 10 of… ” pages.
Semrush caters for this topic, and they have reports to assist. At the time of writing, their cheapest plan is $140 a month.
You should find a way to see all the sites that link or a site. Find the linkreators that link to the linkreators.
A backlink is a link from one website to another and is an essential component of SEO. Backlinks forms part of link building, and act as references for search engines, signaling that the linked website provides valuable content. When a website links to your website, it boosts your site’s authority and can improve its ranking in search results.
To assist companies with their SEO, we have created a directory of people and businesses who has published content that we found very helpful, we call it the Wingmen of Website Squadron.
If you are a web design agency, and you have several websites that you manages, do not link to your website from their websites. These backlinks will not count, as search engines know they are on the same server.
Backlinks from untrustworthy sources could end up hurting your domain authority.
There is a strategy out there to buy backlinks, but this is against Google policy, it is called Link Spam. Google explicitly states that you are not allowed to buy or sell backlinks. To quote them through:
“Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value to the <a> tag.”
Google has recently confirmed that Backlinks are still one of their top 3 ranking signals, and, there is a correlation between how many sites link to your website, vs how high your site will rank on Google.
One should attempt to get a backlink from a high quality source like bloggers in your industry.
Links matter, they form the foundation of their algorithm.
Creating these backlinks should be a very important part of your SEO strategy.
About pages do not rank.
Each page should have its own set of keywords you home to rank for. Home page can be your company name, but products and services should focus on that. Rank for one unique keyword per page.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of enhancing your website in such a way that it achieves higher rankings across various search engine results pages (SERPs). This includes major platforms like Google, Microsoft Bing, TikTok and Instagram. TikTok and Instagram are search engines too.
SEO entails targeting the most relevant and impactful search keywords, search phrases or hashtags for your target audience.
The primary goal of SEO is to rank first on SERPs in order to secure first-page first-position visibility, thereby driving increased organic traffic to your website.
Craft a Strong Title: Ensure your website title is close to 59 characters and accurately represents your content.
Meta Description: Use a plugin to create meta descriptions around 160 characters for better visibility in search results.
H1 Header Tag: Match your H1 tag with the title and meta description for consistency and SEO optimization.
Robots.txt: Create and upload a robots.txt file to guide search engine crawlers.
Sitemap: Generate a sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml file and upload it to the root directory for easy navigation.
Indexing: Use Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to index your site pages efficiently.
Learn SEO Fundamentals: Focus on concepts like Open Graph tags for enhanced social media sharing, targeted keywords to attract your audience effectively, backlinks to improve site authority, mobile-friendliness to ensure an optimal user experience across devices, and more
Search engines say they track the time a user spends on your website, but the verdict is not out about what exactly the impact is. A lot of SEO “experts” will say that the more time spent on your content, the higher the quality of your content, and thus the better the ranking will be. Google even measures that in GA4, giving you the impression that that is a ranking factor. We are, however, not convinced, and until we see proof of this, will not believe nor promote this idea.
A search result page is a webpage generated by a search engine that displays a list of relevant results in response to a user’s search query. It can consist of several other listings.
Featured snippets are highlighted answers displayed at the top of the page in response to certain queries.
