SEO Best Practices: On-Page SEO Checklist

SEO represents one of the most important things you can do for your website. Optimizing your website will allow you to grow your business faster by converting more. In this article, we’ll break down the best SEO practices. Make sure to follow our On-Page SEO Checklist.

On-page SEO is everything you control on your own pages: the words, the HTML, the structure, the links between your pages and the speed at which all of it loads. Unlike link building, none of it depends on somebody else saying yes, which is why it is the cheapest and fastest part of SEO to fix. The fundamentals below have not changed in years, but several of the details have. Title length is judged in pixels rather than characters, keyword density targets belong to an older generation of search engines, and Core Web Vitals now measure Interaction to Next Paint instead of First Input Delay, which was retired in March 2024. This checklist reflects how each element is actually treated today.

Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking higher in the search results. Search engines rank websites for a specific keyword based on their relevance and authority. The title tag will tell the search engines if your website is relevant for the searched keyword.

You first have to perform a thorough keyword research to determine the best keywords for your brand. Once you have figured out your two main keywords, include them in the title tag along with your brand name. Make sure you keep your title tags short enough to display in full while avoiding duplicates.

Google truncates titles by pixel width rather than by character count, so roughly 55 to 60 characters is the safe working limit for a Latin alphabet. A pattern that survives most rewrites is Primary Keyword – Qualifier | Brand. Front-load the term you actually want to rank for, because the first words carry the most weight with both the algorithm and the person scanning ten blue links.

A worked example. A page selling emergency plumbing in Manchester might start life with the title Home | Best Cheap Plumbing Services, Plumber, Plumbing Repair, Plumbing Company. It is long, it is keyword stuffed, and the first word tells nobody anything. Rewritten as Emergency Plumbing Repairs in Manchester | Your Brand, it fits on screen, names the service and the location, and matches what people actually type. Note that Google rewrites titles when it judges them stuffed, empty, boilerplate or mismatched with the page content. The defence is not a trick, it is accuracy: a descriptive title that agrees with the H1 and the body copy is the one most likely to be kept.

• One unique title per URL, no duplicates anywhere on the site.
• One primary keyword, placed as close to the start as reads naturally.
• Brand at the end, unless the brand itself is the query.
• No ALL CAPS, no chains of separators, no comma-separated keyword lists.
• The title should make sense read on its own, out of context.

Meta Description

Although not as important as the title tag when it comes to rankings, the meta description is essential for increasing your click-through-rate. As shown in our SEO Abbreviations Explained article, the first two SERP positions receive roughly 50% of all the clicks. You can increase your chances of getting a click by having a solid meta description.

The meta description will be the one to gain the attention of the users. Your meta descriptions should be detailed while including your main page/article keyword. This way you can increase the likelihood of receiving a click.

Google has said plainly that the description is not a ranking factor, so treat it as ad copy rather than as an optimisation slot. Around 150 to 160 characters displays in full on desktop and less on mobile, so put the important half first. Search engines regularly replace the description with a passage lifted from the page when that passage answers the query better, which is a reminder that the body copy has to be good too, not only the tag.

A description that earns clicks answers three things in order: what this page is, who it is for, and why someone should open it instead of the result above. Include the keyword, because Google bolds terms that match the query and bold text draws the eye. Avoid repeating the title word for word, avoid double quotes that can truncate the snippet awkwardly, and never ship the same description across a whole category of pages.

Quality Content

The content present on your website and its quality will play an important role in your rankings. Your content must be relevant and high-quality. More in-depth valuable content will signal to the search engines that your website is of authority, ranking you higher.

Include your target keyword where it genuinely belongs: the title, the first paragraph, at least one subheading and the URL. After that, write for the reader. Keyword density targets such as one to two percent of the text were useful when search engines matched strings, but they now match meaning, so a page that covers a subject completely and uses natural variations of the phrase will beat a page that hits an arbitrary percentage. The behaviour that still does damage is repetition that reads badly. If a sentence exists only to fit the keyword in one more time, delete it.

What replaces density is coverage and credibility. Before writing, read the pages currently ranking for your term and list the questions they answer, then answer those plus the ones they miss. Google’s own guidance leans on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, which in practice means showing the work: name the author, say who they are, cite the source of any figure, show a screenshot or an example, and put a visible last-updated date on pages where the answer changes over time. Length follows from coverage. Match the depth of what is ranking rather than chasing a word count, and cut anything that pads.

Match the format to the intent as well. A query phrased as a question wants a direct answer in the first two sentences. A comparison query wants a table. A commercial query wants pricing signals, proof and a clear next step. Getting the format wrong is one of the most common reasons a well-written page never ranks. If you are new to the terminology used in this process, the SEO abbreviations guide covers the acronyms you will meet along the way.

Headings and Page Structure

Headings are the skeleton of the page. Use a single H1, which on most content management systems is the page title, then H2 for each main section and H3 for the points inside it. Do not skip a level to get a smaller font, that is what styling is for. Read your headings on their own from top to bottom: if they work as a table of contents and roughly describe what the page delivers, the structure is right. Descriptive beats clever here, because headings are what search engines and assistive technology use to understand the shape of a document, and clear subheadings make a page far easier to quote in an answer box.

URL Structure

Keep URLs short, lowercase, separated by hyphens and readable when pasted into a message with no other context. Include the main keyword, drop the filler words, and avoid session IDs, dates and numeric identifiers in evergreen content. One important rule: an existing URL that already ranks is an asset. If you must change it, put a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one and update every internal link that pointed at it, rather than leaving redirect chains behind.

Internal Linking

On your On-Page SEO Checklist, internal linking should be present. Use relevant anchor texts in your articles and link from them to your most important pages. Always link from “tail-to-head,” from your less important pages to your main ones.

Search Engine crawlers will be able to pick up on your internal linking and guide themselves easier on your website. This way you will be able to signal which pages are the important ones, setting up an internal hierarchy.

In practice, three to eight contextual links inside the body of a normal article is a sensible range, placed where they help the reader rather than bolted on at the end. Vary the anchor text instead of repeating one exact phrase, since a natural profile mixes the exact term, close variations and the page title. Every commercially important page should sit within three clicks of the homepage, and no published page should be an orphan with zero internal links pointing at it. Two habits keep this tidy over time: whenever you publish something new, add links to it from two or three older pages that already rank, and whenever you update an old page, check whether it should point at anything you have published since.

Image Alt Tags

Images will constitute an essential part of your website and most importantly, content. Utilizing ALT tags and setting up the right filenames for each image is a must. Search engines will be able to understand the topic of your image through these tags.

Make sure to use descriptive titles when naming your image and to separate the words through dashes. If possible, aim to include your keyword in the filename and the alt tag of your image.

Write alt text as if you were describing the picture to somebody who cannot see it, in one plain sentence. Purely decorative images should carry an empty alt attribute so screen readers skip them, and no image needs the keyword forced into it twice. The other half of image optimisation is delivery, which is where most sites lose the most time.

• Compress every image and serve modern formats such as WebP or AVIF with a fallback.
• Set explicit width and height attributes so the browser reserves the space and the layout does not jump.
• Lazy-load images below the fold, but never lazy-load the main image at the top, because that is usually the element the Largest Contentful Paint measures.
• Use responsive srcset sizes so phones do not download a desktop-sized file.
• Name files descriptively before upload, for example emergency-plumbing-manchester.jpg rather than IMG_4471.jpg.

Core Web Vitals and Page Experience

Speed is part of on-page work because it is part of the page. Three metrics make up the Core Web Vitals, and each has a published good threshold measured at the 75th percentile of real visits: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less. Interaction to Next Paint replaced First Input Delay in March 2024, and it is a stricter measure because it looks at every interaction on the page rather than only the first one, so sites that passed comfortably under the old metric are worth re-checking.

Check the field data in the Core Web Vitals report inside Google Search Console, since that reflects real visitors rather than a single lab test on a fast connection. The usual wins are unglamorous: compress and correctly size the hero image, remove render-blocking scripts, cut third-party tags you no longer use, reserve space for ads and embeds, and defer anything that is not needed for the first screen. Keep it in proportion, though. Speed is a tie-breaker between comparable pages, not a substitute for relevance, so fix the content first and the milliseconds second.

Structured Data

Structured data does not make a page rank higher by itself, but it helps search engines understand what the page is and it can change how the result looks. Add Organization and Breadcrumb markup site-wide, Article on posts, Product on product pages and LocalBusiness where you serve a physical area. Two rules matter: mark up only what is genuinely visible on the page, and validate the output with the Rich Results Test before you assume it works. Remember also that eligibility changes over time. FAQ rich results, for instance, were restricted in 2023 to well-known authoritative government and health sites, so an FAQ section is still useful for readers and for context, but you should not count on it producing extra space in the search results.

The Checklist at a Glance

Element	What to check	Practical benchmark
Title tag	Unique, keyword near the front, brand at the end	Roughly 55 to 60 characters
Meta description	Unique, written as ad copy, keyword included	Roughly 150 to 160 characters
H1	Exactly one, agrees with the title tag	1 per page
Subheadings	Logical H2 and H3 order, no skipped levels	Reads as a table of contents
URL	Short, lowercase, hyphenated, keyword present	Redirect with 301 if changed
Body content	Covers the intent and the follow-up questions	Matches the depth of what ranks
Internal links	Descriptive, varied anchors, no orphan pages	3 to 8 contextual links per article
Images	Descriptive filenames and alt text, compressed	Modern format, dimensions set
Core Web Vitals	Field data, not a single lab run	LCP 2.5s, INP 200ms, CLS 0.1
Structured data	Matches visible content, validates cleanly	No errors in the Rich Results Test
Indexability	Self-referencing canonical, no stray noindex	Confirmed by URL Inspection

How to Run This Checklist on a Single Page

Working page by page beats running a site-wide audit you never finish. Here is the sequence we use, which takes well under an hour for a normal article.

1. Search your target keyword and open the top results. Note the format they use and the questions they answer.
2. Open your page and read the first screen out loud. If it does not make the topic and the promise obvious, fix that before anything else.
3. Rewrite the title tag and meta description using the rules above, then check how they truncate.
4. Check the heading structure. One H1, sensible H2s, no decorative level skipping.
5. Fill the content gaps you listed in step one, and delete the padding you find while doing it.
6. Add internal links from at least three existing pages to this one, using varied descriptive anchors.
7. Rename, compress and describe the images, and confirm the top image is not lazy-loaded.
8. Run the URL through PageSpeed Insights and through URL Inspection in Search Console to confirm it is indexable and rendering as expected.
9. Note the date of the change, then compare clicks, impressions and average position in Search Console four to six weeks later. Judge the result on that data rather than on a rank you saw once in your own browser.

Common On-Page Mistakes

• Two pages targeting the same keyword, competing with each other instead of consolidating.
• Titles and descriptions generated automatically from the same template across hundreds of URLs.
• Publishing a page and never linking to it from anywhere.
• Rewriting a page that already ranks, changing the URL, and forgetting the redirect.
• Chasing a word count instead of answering the question.
• Leaving a staging noindex tag in place after launch, which quietly removes the page from search.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a page be?

Long enough to answer the query completely and no longer. There is no minimum word count that triggers a ranking. Open the pages that currently rank, list what they cover, and make sure yours covers at least that plus whatever they leave out.

Is keyword density still a ranking factor?

No. Placement and relevance replaced density. Put the term in the title, the opening, one subheading and the URL, use natural variations through the body, and stop counting. Over-repetition is more likely to hurt readability than to help rankings.

Does the meta description affect rankings?

Not directly. It affects whether people click, which is why it is still worth writing carefully. Google may also replace it with text from your page if that text matches the query better.

What is the difference between on-page and technical SEO?

On-page SEO covers what is on the page itself: content, titles, headings, internal links and images. Technical SEO covers how the site is built and crawled: server responses, indexation rules, sitemaps, rendering and site architecture. They overlap around speed and structured data, and both sit on your own side of the fence, unlike off-page work such as link building.

How often should I revisit these elements?

Review your most important commercial pages twice a year and after any redesign or migration. Articles that lose impressions in Search Console over a quarter are the ones to refresh next, since a page that is already known to search engines usually recovers faster than a brand new one takes to rank.

Do Core Web Vitals still matter after the switch to INP?

Yes, and the switch made responsiveness harder to fake. Interaction to Next Paint looks at all interactions rather than only the first one, so heavy scripts that used to hide behind a fast initial response now show up. Treat the thresholds as a quality bar for users first and a ranking tie-breaker second.

Conclusion

One of the most important ranking factors is your on-site optimization. A highly-optimized website will be ranked higher, driving more traffic. By following our On-Page SEO Checklist, you will be able to improve your website instantly.

Work through it one page at a time, starting with the pages that already earn impressions but few clicks, because those are the ones where a better title, a tighter opening and a few internal links produce the fastest visible change. For the official reference on each point, Google’s SEO Starter Guide and the Core Web Vitals documentation are the sources worth bookmarking.