10 Non-Obvious and Practical SEO Tricks for Your Website

Optimization is an obligatory procedure for any successful site. In the modern web, there are billions of resources of any kind. Hardworking search engine bots crawl from one to another, building some sort of hierarchy for displaying in search results.

No wonder specialists in this field are tirelessly looking for new means of tricking search bots into “thinking” that the resource is relevant and deserves high ranks. This process is increasingly reminiscent of an arms race: in the world of SEO, best practices are the subject of competition and are kept secret to the bitter. We analyzed interesting optimization techniques not obvious to beginners; some can be surprising even for an experienced site owner.

The click-through rate allows you to see how many visits a site has received after viewing an ad. Thanks to this, we can analyze statistics and determine the success of the advertising or your site ranking. We all understand that a sweeping majority of clicks go to the resources on the first page of the search results. The logical conclusion is to guarantee that your CTR is as high as possible. Here are some SEO practices used in 2021 to achieve these goals:

• Make your snippet attractive. Snippets influence a user’s decision to click on the link, but they usually undergo massive editing from Google. Don’t become discouraged; you can implement keywords into descriptions, URL links, meta titles. Make sure that the information is timely and currently important, revise old posts regularly.
• Don’t be afraid of using favicons. For conservative users, they look suspiciously reminiscent of advertisements, but young audiences prefer icons to URLs.
• Make your snippets informative. Use them as an opportunity to publish microdata, like ratings, prices, or guide parts. Users consider such snippets relevant and readily click.
• Give full informative answers to users’ questions. A relatively new algorithm in SEO practices analyzes the text meaning and decides if it’s good for short answers or not. The pages with valuable information receive higher ranks.

Check the content you published earlier. Analyze the most popular pages and the popular queries. Add keywords to the pages that don’t perform well. In writing new posts, don’t forget about the well-known rule of obligatory content quality. In developing a global SEO strategy, consider dividing the information into several parts or clusters dedicated to certain topics. Well-structured information is valued both by Google and visitors.

Pay attention to your posts’ size. Long articles are more popular, and Google defines the pages with articles longer than 1500 words as valuable more often. Information reliability is important too; let the specialists write texts on their topics; for example, invite an IT expert if your resource is dedicated to this area. Keywords are not a modern idea in SEO practices, but they are still a must. Try to embed them into the text as smooth and organic as possible; obvious keys spoil the impression and reduce the chances of returning to your site in the future.

Smart SEO tactics use the internal and external links potential to draw more traffic. Internal links are used to connect different pages on one domain and increase resource indexing.

External links enhance the resource weight from the search engine point of view. Don’t neglect this valuable tool and use both types to promote your site. Here are some rules on correct linking:

• pages important for promotion should receive the greater amount of links;
• use links only for quality resources;
• utilize HTML maps if your resource is big and contains tons of information;
• think through the links’ text from the relevant point of view;
• check for broken links regularly;
• use multiple blocks allowing to add of modular links o related articles, lists, etc.;
• at least twice a year, analyze the popularity of links;
• try to improve the site convenience; the main pages should require three clicks to find.

Generally speaking, your site’s articles can be divided into the following categories: main posts and cluster content. The first category is dedicated to the main topics of your field. In clusters, you will post the information on side topics or related issues. Two types of articles are connected with internal links. Visitors appreciate links to the additional information on topic-related matters after the main article. It makes the site structure understandable and convenient to use. The user can spend more time on your site; it’s a more effective connection method than a search form.

One of the best SEO tricks is the optimization of your pages with long-tail keywords. They prevail in the search queries, so they attract more traffic to your resource. There are some reasons for their popularity among SEO practices, according to Google Statistics:

• they have a higher conversion rate;
• they enhance your content by adding context;
• they bring the organic traffic you need;
• they improve the content position because of their value for readers.

The easiest way to determine relevant queries is to enter the topic in the search bar and analyze the autosuggestions. Check out the top sites in your area for such keywords. Google Analytics offers valuable tools for this task; get as much information from it as possible. You can optimize your keyword by adding images, meta title tags, embedding the keywords into the articles’ titles, and using external links. Remember that long-tail keywords are often used for a voice search.

Search for new ideas for SEO practices? Don’t forget to use the most obvious tools. Video is more popular than texts for most users so that you can utilize the great potential of such content. Moreover, visitors tend to spend more time on the page with video content and consider such page more reliable and useful.

Implementing videos will bring you several benefits:

• enhancement of your resource reliability;
• boost of your influence on visitors;
• extra subscriptions;
• increased time of visiting the page.

Don’t forget about video content optimization: add descriptions to the videos, create a title close to the main title of the page, use subtitles and transcript, make a map of videos, or include them into the existing one. Like in the case with text material, make research of popular queries to find out the most popular keywords for your video materials and use only high-quality information.

In the era of sharing and liking, it’s a crime not to use the rich potential of social networking. Nowadays, you don’t need to post every article manually; special tools allow you to schedule your materials to be published to keep your subscribers interested. Adding social media share buttons to your blog or site can be a good idea too. It’s a free method of spreading your content and boosting resource popularity. Search engines define the frequently shared content as valuable and important; you need to receive higher ranks and increase organic traffic.

Include quality images and photos in your posts to make them more attractive and enhance chances of sharing. Users prefer to publish visual materials in their feed. You can master graphical editors to create quality content or hire a designer and choose according to the project budget.

Image description and meta title are great places to embed keywords. It’s one of the best SEO practices: Google will consider such content more relevant and place your site high in the ranking. So, you are killing two birds with one stone, attracting visitors and boosting indexing.

Another interesting method of using social media for site promotion in collaboration with influencers in your field. Choose the influencer suitable for your budget (the higher the popularity, the more you need to pay to mention your resource or post desired information) and ask for partnership. The effect of such collaboration is enormous, and the traffic will rise significantly.

Analyze the efficiency of your old content. You probably have a lot of information on similar topics, and the data in your posts can overlap. Usually, such old pages don’t attract a lot of visitors and require some modifications. Remember about the positive effect of long articles? Consolidate several posts into a large one and receive an increased amount of traffic for one URL.

To do it the right way, follow these steps:

• Analyze the performance of your page and find the underperforming parts of the site.
• Select articles with similar information or posts on the same topic that can be united. Choose the page with the highest traffic.
• Combine the materials and place a new article on the most popular page you discovered in the previous step. Depending on circumstances, you can add new sections to your old content or rewrite several posts in one.
• Embed internal links to the new article into the corresponding old posts and archive them after that. Now you have a brand-new post with high weight and up-to-date content.

You can consider adding new keywords into the big consolidated article; it will boost its performance in terms of traffic attraction.

The world of mobile devices develops with light speed, and you have to keep track of all important changes. We recommend paying attention to two major trends: an increase in mobile users and frequent utilization of voice search.

First, make sure that your resource is mobile-friendly. Provide seamless access from all types of mobile devices and ensure high loading speed. This factor is especially significant for smartphones and tablets with mobile internet connections. Speed optimization can bring another benefit: Google gives priority to the fast-loading resources. It’s a win-win situation, your visitors will receive a seamless user experience, and you’ll get higher ranks and more traffic. Make a research on keywords for mobile users. Yes, they aren’t the same as in the case of desktop site access. Ensure the presence of both categories of keywords on your pages.

People become more efficient these days; they don’t want to spend time on typing and errors correction, which explains the growing popularity of voice search. Use this fact to your advantage. The main part of voice search queries is questions with keywords. Add a FAQ section in your resource to make the site relevant for such kinds of users. Most voice queries concentrate on local-specific questions; you can use this information for further content optimization.

The potential of famous resources dedicated to answering the questions is hard to underestimate. You can get valuable expert information there, but more importantly, they allow placing a link on the site with a solid reputation. Well-known sites like Quora, Stack Overflow, and answers.com will help you to check information before publishing. They all have proven reliability in Google and can be a perfect place for link placement.

Don’t ignore the necessity of constant competitor analysis. Check the domains where they publish their links and do the same if resource credibility is high. You can collaborate with new but promising resources focused on quality content. In this case, link exchange will work as a long-term strategy both for you and your affiliate.

In SEO, good practices can become a major factor in your success but don’t forget about the users you are working for in the optimization process. Make your content for people, not for algorithms; ensure it’s up-to-date and contains reliable, proven information. Don’t betray your visitors’ confidence; it’s a way to failure and is unacceptable for an honest entrepreneur.

Nowadays, Google reviews sites not only for a unique but for quality of information. Your articles shouldn’t contain misleading or false data. If the information you provide could hurt users, it’s a direct road to ban. If you are involved with medical or financial topics, the checking will be more thorough, and you risk facing more problems. You can prevent it by inviting experts and well-known specialists, publishing the data of scientific researches, and checking all details before publication.