On-page SEO is the part you fully control, which makes it the part worth finishing properly. Work down this list before a page goes live and you will have done more than most sites ever do.
The four that matter most
- One clear topic per page. If a page tries to rank for two unrelated things, it usually ranks for neither. Split it.
- A title tag under about sixty characters that names the topic first and the brand last. This is what people read in the results, so write it for them.
- One H1 that matches the promise of the title. A visitor who clicks a title and lands on a different heading leaves immediately.
- A meta description that earns the click. It is not a ranking factor, but it decides how many people choose your result over the one above it.
Write the title last
Draft the page, then write the title from what the page actually delivers. Titles written first tend to promise something the content never gets round to.
Structure and content
- Headings nest properly: H2 for sections, H3 beneath them, no skipped levels.
- The main answer appears above the fold, not after eight hundred words of preamble.
- The primary phrase appears naturally in the first hundred words. Once is enough.
- Related terms appear because you covered the subject properly, not because you sprinkled them.
- The URL is short, readable and uses hyphens.
- The page is long enough to answer the question and no longer.
Links, images and the technical floor
| Check | Why |
|---|---|
| Three to five internal links | They pass authority and show search engines how the page fits your site. Use descriptive anchor text, never "click here". |
| Descriptive alt text on every image | It serves screen readers first and image search second. Decorative images take an empty alt attribute. |
| Compressed images in a modern format | Images are the usual reason a page is slow, and speed affects both ranking and whether anyone waits. |
| A canonical tag | It tells search engines which URL is the real one when the same content is reachable more than one way. |
| Mobile layout checked at 360px | Most traffic is mobile. Test the narrowest common width, not the widest. |
Before you publish
- Open the page on a phone and read it end to end.
- Check every link resolves.
- Confirm the page is not blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag left over from staging.
- Add it to the sitemap.
- Request indexing in Search Console, then check back in a week to see which queries it actually picked up.
Key takeaways
- One topic, one H1, one honest title per page.
- Put the answer near the top; preamble costs you readers and rankings.
- Internal links with descriptive anchor text do more than most people expect.
- Check the page on a 360px screen before you publish it anywhere.
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