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:
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.
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.
Organic listings are ranked by the search engine’s algorithm based on relevance and quality.
Paid results are marked as “Ad” or “Sponsored”.
Featured snippets are highlighted answers displayed at the top of the page in response to certain queries.
Knowledge panel is a box with detailed information about the topic on the right-hand side.
Local results (map pack) is a section showing nearby businesses related to the query, under Places.
It is the work one can do on one’s website to optimize it for higher ranking on search engines.
Off-page SEO refers to all the actions you take outside of your own website to improve its ranking in search engine results.
The main focus of off-page SEO is building your website’s authority and trust in the eyes of Google and Bing.
This is primarily done through backlinks, links from other websites pointing to your website.
Backlinks act like votes of confidence—when reputable websites link to your website, it signals that your content is valuable and trustworthy. However, not all links are good; links from low-quality or spammy websites can hurt your website’s rankings.
Another important part of off-page SEO is the anchor text, which is the clickable text in a link. Having your target keywords in anchor text helps with rankings.
Off-page SEO also includes monitoring where your links come from and ensuring they’re relevant and natural.
Overall, off-page SEO is about building your site’s reputation across the Internet so that search engines see it as an authority in its niche.
It is about having a body of content on a specific subject that consistently ranks well in search results. In other words, relevancy.
It’s not some mysterious new ranking factor but rather an observable outcome of building a comprehensive resource that covers all aspects of a given topic.
When your website has multiple pages addressing related subtopics, it signals to search engines that you’re a trusted resource in that area. You earn this “authority” by staying focused on relevance. Publish targeted content and organize internal links to support your site’s subject matter.
Topical Authority isn’t achieved by relying solely on backlinks or simply pumping out content without strategic focus.
Topical Authority results from a holistic approach. It combines high-quality, user-focused content with natural backlinks and effective on-page SEO. You cannot substitute one element for the other; content creation and link-building work together to build and sustain your authority on a topic.
Topical Authority means your website is a valuable, niche resource. It helps your website rank for more related keywords.
Domain Authority is a way to measure a website’s popularity or trustworthiness, especially when it comes to ranking on Google and Bing.
It is a metric that attempts to estimate how likely a website is to rank compared to others, and each vendor interprets it differently. The vendors are trying to simulate PageRank.
The higher the authority, the more powerful a link from a website is.
While “Domain Authority” is a popular name (originally coined by Moz), it also refers to the “authority” of a website. Websites with high authority are also called authoritative domains.
People also call this:
Domain Rating (DR) — used by ahrefs
Authority Score — used by SEMRUSH
Trust Flow and Citation Flow — used by Majestic
Sometimes “link strength” or “site strength“
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contact@websitesquadron.com
Christiaan Gouws
+40 766 196 119
