FAQ

We use “keyword” quite a lot in our software products and also in our documentation.

Keyword is a word which here and everywhere where we write means:

“keyword or keyphrase (key phrase). it can be made up of one word or ten words. Length doesn’t really matter for the purpose of this definition”

There you have it.

Some people think a keyword is only something like “wordpress”. Whereas something like “wordpress premium themes” is a key phrase.

We don’t care about such lengthy and complicated definitions. We’re calling all of them keywords, in order to be able to provide as much clarity as possible.

If anybody ever asks you about this, just refer them to this page.

At the Squirrly company we also think of topics in terms of keywords.

“WordPress Premium Themes” is a topic and a keyword at the same time. Therefore, we usually just use either “topic” or “keyword” in such cases, so that we do not repeat ourselves.

The topic of a page, of an article, of a presentation, or of a video could very well be the keyword that you’d optimize that content type for.

Answer 1: Yes, the search engine which owns almost 80% of the market does concern itself with showing accurate information regarding that which people try to find online.

OR: read the following answer to your question (Hint: it’s the better one):

Answer 2: Yes, there are clear indicators that prove Google still takes keywords into account when displaying search results. It would be pretty weird to display search results for keywords that someone searches for without using the keywords that someone searches for.

As you yourself can see in Answer 2: you understand what I’m typing much better because you get to read what you intended to read when you wrote your own words.. your own keywords.

My keywords match your keywords, and you prefer Answer 2 as opposed to Answer 1. Therefore, if Google would send you to a page which only contained answer 1, you’d immediately feel like you landed on the wrong page and you’d hit the BACK button in your browser. That would send a signal to Google telling them that you don’t like the page.

Their people and also their system have seen this happening quite often.

In the first answer I provided, I just wrote similar words to your keywords and you felt like you weren’t reading an answer for your exact question.

Engineers at Google are very smart and they know these things better than anyone else. Do not believe the hype, do not believe articles written by others on the web with the sole purpose of making them sound smart and desirable.

By using the right sets of words, it will be easier for your answers and your pages to match the intent of the person searching on the web.

If your page is 100% Optimized for a keyword and the items inside Focus Pages in Squirrly SEO are turned to Green, you will always outrank pages that weren’t written 100% for that exact keyword.

Sometimes, you’ll see the TOP 10 positions for “anime toys” be completely different than TOP 10 positions for “best anime toys”, or “anime best toys”, etc.

Google knows that people need to see the keywords they searched for inside the articles they land on. If you want more indication of this, see how Google tries to match the META Description when displaying search results. Sometimes it doesn’t care about the META Description you wrote. They will show to their user a Meta Description that is as close to the exact keywords as possible.

Therefore, they keep using keywords. [this article is about Keywords in general, NOT about META keywords]

If the Squirrly Live Assistant doesn’t load in your Post Editor or for other Posts Types, please follow these instructions:

• Make sure you DIDN’T select any post type for exclusion in Squirrly > Live Assistant > Settings.

(IMPORTANT NOTE! The Exclusions section where you can disable the SEO Live Assistant for a post type is only visible when using Squirrly SEO with SEO Expert Mode)

• Make sure you check Squirrly to load on Screen Options in Post Editor (top-right corner). You can activate and deactivate screen blocks from Screen Options.

• Deactivate browser extensions that may prevent Post Editor blocks from loading (e.g. Adbloks, Privacy badger).
  
• Try to load the Post Editor using another browser or start the browser without any extensions.

Important! A Squirrly user told us that the live assistant wasn’t loading on Firefox and that they had the extension called Privacy badger active.

If the issue persists even after you’ve followed these steps, please reach out to us via one of our support channels so that we can look into it.

Even though they are part of the same WordPress installation, Squirrly SEO treats each sub-site as an individual website with no connection to the others within the Multisite network.

Since each sub-site is considered a separate/new website, you’ll need to connect each one from WP Multisite with Squirrly Cloud.

If you have a free account at Squirrly, you can connect only one sub-site from your network to your account. If you have up to 5 sites, we recommend you to switch to the PRO plan.

If you connect more websites to a free account by mistake, you can remove the extra websites from https://my.squirrly.co/blogs.

How do you know if you have too many websites connected to Squirrly?

Once you connect too many websites to Squirrly, you will get a warning box in the WordPress post editor that looks like this:

Once you remove the extra websites, the warning will disappear and you can continue to use the Squirrly Live Assistant on your website.

Squirrly will not remove or deactivate on-page metas if you connect too many websites by mistake.

Whether you’re launching a new website, publishing a new piece of content, or updating an existing page, it’s important to let Google know about it so that the bots can crawl and index it as soon as possible.

Now, most website owners want to speed up the indexing process. And luckily, there’s a way to do this.

All you need to do is follow these easy steps:

1. Add your site to Google Search Console. If you’ve already done this, then you can skip this and move on to step 2.
2. Go to the Google Search Console Dashboard. On the menu that’s on the right side, select Crawl > Fetch as Google.
3.  If you want to reindex your site, then leave the field blank and just click Fetch. If you want to reindex a specific URL, then add the words that complete the URL and then click Fetch. For example, if you want to crawl your blog and the URL for your blog is https://yoursite.com/blog, then you need to write “blog” in the field.
4. Below, you’ll see the status of this process. Once it’s completed, you can click on Request indexing.

That’s it.

Keep in mind that there’s a quota for submitting URLs, so you don’t want to go overboard and do this every time you make a small change on your site.

Google usually works like this:

• If you write an article, the article is fresh and Google will index you depending of your article optimization.
• If the article is indexed and people are not reading it, not sharing it and are not sending links to it, after a few days Google will consider the article as not important and change its rank position.

This is just one possible reason why your rankings may go down. It’s important to consistently monitor the rankings of your key pages, and add them to Focus Pages if you see the ranking go down. The Focus Pages system will run a diagnosis of your page and indicate tasks you need to complete to improve that page’s chances of ranking at the top of Google Search.

We sometimes get this question over email: “How to write a long tail keyword?“.

Here is a short and clear answer to explain it:

Focus on something like “buy cheap steam games” instead of a basic keyword like “steam“.

By focusing on long tail keywords, you improve your chances of being found via search engines and you might get better rankings because long tails have less competition.

Money-making wise: Buy Cheap Steam Games is a better keyword to go with, because it will bring to your site people who already WANT to BUY games for the Steam PC platform, not just random people looking to find out what “Steam” means.

Keep Ranking!

PS: it’s easier to answer with clear examples. Steam is a gaming platform where you can buy PC or Mac games. The example is from a real case. Using “buy cheap steam games” helped the online store sell 92 units of PC games in the first month when rankings kicked in.

Optimizing your posts (and pages) for  relevant keywords is essential for the success of your site. With Squirrly’s keyword research feature, you can now choose the best keywords to use for the content you write.

You may find yourself in one these 2 situations:

1. Your site has high authority, which means you can use keywords which have a lot of competition. Your pages will appear in the first pages of search results in this case.
2. Your site has a low authority or you’ve just started out, which means that in order to appear in the first pages of Google, you need to go for long-tail keywords or terms which don’t have a lot of competition.

So, you need to determine the situation you’re in and then do a keyword research to see what you can use.

Keep in mind that if your site has low authority and you use keywords with high competition, you can still rank your pages for those terms, but you will need to do some link building campaigns and have a lot of social shares for them. So it may take months to get there.

Head over to this page where we explained how to keyword research feature works and how to use it to your advantage when optimizing a post. 

It’s actually extremely easy to avoid over-optimizing your posts and pages, especially when you use the Squirrly SEO plugin.

One of its powerful features is the SEO live assistant, which is the section you can see on the right side in your WordPress editor.

What’s great about the live assistant is that it tells you in real-time if you covered all areas when it comes to optimization and, most importantly, if you’ve over optimized.

So, you can never go wrong with this feature from Squirrly because all your posts and pages will be human AND search engine friendly as long as all the sections are turned green.