By marie_dm 🌺 ・6 comments

Many of you showed an interest in doing a webinar about SEO. Happens we do have a skilled member on this topic on Women Make: Steph Smith.

@stephsmith is the former Head of Publications at Toptal and has worked with other top media brands. She does a lot of SEO for her job and probably has the answers to your questions. She kindly agreed to do an online Q&A next week (date & time to be defined yet).

I'd like to gather some of your questions beforehand. You will be able to ask more during the webinar of course, but it'd be nice for Steph to have an idea of what you expect from her.

So go, ask your questions in the comments! And join us next week, Steph will answer your questions during the online webinar.


UPDATE

The Q&A will happen on Wednesday, May 13th at 10:30 am PT. All the details can be found here: https://womenmake.com/posts/wlscMjYZEr/women-make-seo-qa-with-steph-smith

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Thank you @stephsmith and @marie_dm for organizing!

I second all of the above and am also curious about how @stephsmith sees the future of SEO.

I see Google pushing the question-answer structure in search results, and a rise in AI usage. How will that affect the way we implement and/or think about SEO?

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Thank you, Steph and Marie, for making this happen!

My SEO knowledge is not very broad, I do basic stuff, like good HTML tagging, definition of titles and metas per page, accessibility, etc. So here are some of my SEO concerns:

After the launch of a site, I wish to know what are the recommendations SEO wise, to monitor and improve the site's performance. What tools should we use, what should we be checking, ...?

I also would like to understand better the use of "nofollow/noindex" on links. Which is the best policy for internal and external links? How do they exactly affect the site's performance?

I'm also interested in SEO recommendations for multi-language sites. I've seen different approaches. Like using one language always like the canonical URL and the other languages ​​as alternates. But Apple, for example, defines as canonical each language's site and includes the rest as alternates. I'm currently doing the latest, but it would be great to have some more input regarding the implications of these types of changes.

These are some questions that come to my mind, but as others have pointed out, any recommendations/best practices would be more than welcome. Thanks!

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This is great! Thank you @stephsmith and @marie_dm

I would love to learn about weight of cross-linking on ranking, especially what not to do (aggregator sites, etc.). Also, I'd like to hear about good SEO maintenance practice. And.... what are best resources to learn from that are updated regularly, maybe favorite blogs with practical tips. I've read Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, but feel like that's not enough. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en&ref_topic=9460495

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Thank you Steph and Marie for organising this! My question: what are the basics of SEO for publishing an article on a personal website?

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What really matters for a good rank? Is loading speed affecting it, how to speed it up? Some tips for relevant keywords

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So glad this is happening! Some questions / broader topics:

-As a designer, what do I need to know about using headers in footer sections? -Is there a checklist of things to consider before publishing a site SEO wise (that Yoast wouldn't provide already) -Apart from alt text, what do I need to know about using images on a site - SEO wise?

I'm really keen to learn about best practices rather than have specific questions answered. Really looking forward to this!

Thanks a lot!

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