Exactly one month ago, on International Women’s Day 2020, the WITFest took place. This full day women-only event at the Barbican was divided into 4 inspiring segments:
Analyse
Roxana Stingu
Is your TTFB slowing you down?
In a world where we want to provide users with as much information as possible all sites struggle with TTFB (time to first byte). Roxana provided tips to improve this metric including reduced network latency, GZIP compression utilised, redirects tidied, faster DNS lookups provided, move to latest SSL protocol, database design optimised and static caching implemented.
Kristina Azarenko
How to create high quality ecommerce categories?
Create categories users are looking for. They’ll be more likely to convert on these pages providing more value to the site. Kristina’s 8 step framework can potentially save 2 years on implementation. One of the keys to this framework is communicating with everyone involved including site owners and developers.
Miracle IInameti-Archibong
Proving your wealth: Demonstrating the value of SEO campaigns
Miracle showed how to set up campaign tracking to ensure the full value of the project can be communicated to and understood by the client.
One of the most important insights is to understand the goals of the company in order to set the correct KPI’s. This ensures the structure of the site can be built out accordingly with the correct content and the right technical implementations to support.
Advance
Aleyda Solis
SEO for Marketplaces: Overcoming technical challenges
Marketplaces, such as Amazon, have the largest sites which attracts many users lower down the conversion funnel. Users expect the same experience no matter which product they’re looking for. With this in mind, sites must make sure products can be discovered and the UX is consistent.
Izzi Smith
Building up powerful entities and connections in 2020
For search engines to understand the relationships between people, places, events and things better entities must be established. The more information the search engines can draw on for the entities, the more accurate the connections will be. This ensures the most relevant information is provided in SERPs to quickly give users the information they need.
Entities can be expanded with structured data and broken into 3 groups to clearly define your SEO strategy:
- Brand entities
g. Company - Domain entities
g. https://www.company.com - Topic entities
g. Company products group A, company products group B and company products group C
Innovate
Hannah Rampton
Delimit your data: Formulas for success
Hannah taught us the value of using simple functions, applications and queries to their full potential for SEO tasks. Have a look at Hannah’s slides and examples to learn master formulae:
| Resource | Location |
| Query | QueryTalk |
| QuerySheets | |
| PAA Tool | PAAtool |
| Search Console Explorer Sheet | SCE-HanR |
| Getting Started with Google Sheets | SheetsHelper |
Ruth Everett
Tackling Python: How it can help with technical SEO
As SEO evolves Python is becoming more essential for task automation and data extraction. Of course many off these tasks require some level of human validation but the more that can be automated, the more time can be saved.
Ruth provided many places to start learning including codeacademy, datacamp, sololearn and codecombat.
Emily Potter
On-page best practices that harm your traffic
Emily ran through some of her on-page SEO experiments and shared her findings of what worked and what didn’t. The most important lesson is to treat any ‘SEO fact’ with caution as different sites suit different techniques and the playing field is constantly evolving. What improved rankings for one site might not improve rankings on another, and what optimised SERPs before might damage performance now.
For more on events like this head over to the Women in Technical SEO site or join their Facebook Group. All scheduled meetups will be virtual for the foreseeable.
