The StackOptic Blog
Practical guides on identifying website technologies, SEO and GEO, web performance and lead generation — from the team behind StackOptic.
How to Optimize for Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are the answer boxes atop Google results. The three snippet types, how to structure content to win them, and the link to voice and AI answers.
What Is Total Blocking Time (TBT) and How to Reduce It
Total Blocking Time is the lab proxy for interactivity. What TBT is, how it relates to INP, what causes a high score, and how to reduce it by taming JavaScript.
How to Tell if a Website Is Hosted on AWS
AWS leaves fingerprints in headers, cookies, DNS and IP ranges — x-amz-* markers, CloudFront, ELB cookies and amazonaws.com DNS. Here is how to read them.
How to Handle Pagination for SEO
Pagination done wrong hides content from Google. The modern best practice: self-referencing canonicals, crawlable links, and view-all vs paginated.
How to Respond to Online Reviews (Good and Bad)
Responding to reviews signals an engaged business and builds real trust. Templates and tactics for positive, neutral and negative reviews — done right.
What Is ARIA and When to Use It
ARIA can make custom widgets accessible — or quietly break them. Here is what WAI-ARIA roles and states do, the first rule of ARIA, and when it genuinely helps.
How to Add Captions and Transcripts to Video
Captions and transcripts make audio and video accessible — and WCAG requires them. Here is what each one is, what the rules say, and how to add them properly.
How to Write a Cold Email That Gets Replies
A structure for cold emails that get replies: a clear subject, a relevant opener, a tight value prop and soft CTA, plus follow-up cadence and deliverability.
What Is Lead Scoring and How to Set It Up
Lead scoring ranks prospects by fit and intent so sales works the best first. How explicit and implicit scoring work, building a model and setting thresholds.
How to Personalize Cold Outreach at Scale
Personalise cold outreach without losing volume: the three tiers of personalisation, the research signals that fuel them, dynamic fields, and deliverability.
What Is a Service-Area Business and How to Do Its SEO
Service-area businesses go to the customer, with no storefront to walk into. Here is what an SAB is, how it differs, and exactly how to do its local SEO.
How to Do Keyword Research (Step by Step)
Keyword research finds the terms your audience searches. A step-by-step method: seed terms, expand, judge volume and intent, then cluster and map to pages.
How to Build Backlinks the Right Way
Backlinks build authority, but only the right ones. White-hat tactics, quality over quantity, anchor diversity and the link schemes Google's policies forbid.
How to Fix Crawl Errors in Google Search Console
Crawl errors keep pages out of Google. How to read the Pages report, what each status means, and how to fix 404s, soft 404s, 5xx errors and not-indexed pages.
What Is International SEO and How hreflang Works
International SEO serves the right language and region to each user. How to structure international URLs, implement hreflang, and avoid mistakes that break it.
How to Improve Your Click-Through Rate in Search
Ranking is half the battle — people still have to click. How to lift search CTR with better titles, meta descriptions, rich results and intent matching.
What Makes a Website Sustainable by Design
Sustainable web design means building lean, efficient sites on purpose. Here are the principles and the design choices that lower carbon while improving UX.
How to Build a Low-Carbon Website
A practical, end-to-end playbook for a low-carbon website: measure first, host green, cut page weight, design efficiently, cache well and keep measuring.
How to Tell if a Website Is Built with Django
Django runs server-side in Python, but it leaves tells: csrftoken and sessionid cookies, /static/ paths and its admin login page. Here is how to spot them.
How to Tell if a Website Is Built with Svelte or SvelteKit
Svelte and SvelteKit leave clear fingerprints: svelte-<hash> scoped classes, data-sveltekit-* attributes and /_app/ chunks. Here is how to detect them fast.
How to Tell if a Website Is Hosted on Vercel or Netlify
Vercel and Netlify leave clear header fingerprints — x-vercel-id and x-nf-request-id among them. Here is how to tell which platform hosts a site, fast.
How to Tell if a Website Uses Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 leaves clear signals: a gtag.js script, a G-XXXXXXX measurement ID, /g/collect requests and _ga cookies. Here is how to spot it fast.
How to Tell if a Website Uses a Cookie Consent Tool (CMP)
OneTrust, Cookiebot, Osano and Usercentrics leave fingerprints: consent banners, scripts and cookies like OptanonConsent. Here is how to detect a site's CMP.
How to Tell if a Website Uses Tailwind CSS
Tailwind CSS leaves a tell-tale fingerprint: utility-class soup like flex pt-4 text-sm md:grid-cols-3 and arbitrary values like w-[327px]. Here is how to detect it.