On-page SEO: the elements worth checking on every page

On-page SEO is everything you control inside a single page: the title, the headings, the copy, the links out of it. This is the list worth working through, and the order that saves the most time.

Where on-page ends and technical begins

The line is useful because the fixes live in different places. Technical SEO asks whether an engine can reach and render the page at all, which is usually a server or template problem. On-page asks whether the page, once retrieved, is understandable and worth ranking. That is usually a writing problem.

Run the technical pass first. Optimising the heading structure of a page that returns 404 to crawlers is a wasted afternoon. The technical audit walkthrough covers that half.

Titles, which do the most work per character

The title element is the single highest-leverage tag on the page. Three rules cover most of it:

• Front-load the distinctive part. Search results truncate around 60 characters, and mobile truncates earlier.
• Make it unique across the site. Duplicate titles are a reliable sign of duplicate intent, which is a bigger problem than the tag.
• Describe the page, not the site. “Pricing” tells a searcher nothing. “Pricing: plans, limits and what the free tier covers” tells them whether to click.

A quick way to find the weak ones: export your titles, sort alphabetically, and read the duplicates. They tend to arrive in clusters from one template.

Meta descriptions, which do less than people think

The description is not a ranking factor. It is ad copy for a result you already earned, and search engines rewrite it perhaps 60% of the time anyway.

Write one regardless, because an empty one is worse than a missing one. A missing tag lets the engine compose something from the page. An empty tag is a statement that there is nothing worth saying.

Aim for 140 to 160 characters, include the term someone would have searched, and make it a sentence rather than a keyword list.

Headings that describe the argument

One h1 per page, matching what the page is about. Then h2 for each distinct section, h3 for subdivisions, in order and without skipping levels.

The reason to care is not that a crawler counts them. It is that headings are how a machine finds the part of the page that answers a question, which matters more every year as answers get lifted rather than linked.

Before

<h1>Welcome</h1>
<h3>Our Services</h3>
<h2>About</h2>

After

<h1>Bookkeeping services for UK contractors</h1>
<h2>What we handle each month</h2>
<h3>VAT returns</h3>
<h2>Pricing</h2>

The second version can be skimmed by a person and parsed by a machine. The first can be done by neither.

Content that answers the query it targets

Length is the wrong target. Coverage is the right one. A page ranks when it answers the question a searcher had, including the follow-up questions they were about to have.

Two checks that catch most problems:

1. Does the page state its answer plainly, early? If someone has to read four paragraphs to find it, so does an answer engine, and it will usually pick a page that does not make it work.
2. Does the page cover the obvious next question? Search the target term, read the “people also ask” box, and check whether your page addresses any of it.

Internal links, which most pages under-use

Internal links do two jobs: they pass authority and they tell an engine what a page is about, through the anchor text.

• Link with descriptive anchors. “Our pricing page” beats “click here”, and beats a bare URL.
• Link from high-authority pages to the ones that need help, not only the reverse.
• Give every page at least three inbound internal links, so nothing depends on the sitemap alone.
• Check for orphans, which are pages nothing links to.

Images, where the cheap wins are

• Alt text that describes the image, written for someone who cannot see it. If it is decorative, use alt="" rather than stuffing a keyword into it.
• Width and height attributes, which prevent layout shift and are the most common cause of a poor Cumulative Layout Shift score.
• Modern formats and lazy loading below the fold.

The elements most on-page checkers still miss

Standard tools grade the list above and stop. Three more matter now:

• Content present without JavaScript. A page that renders client-side arrives at most answer-engine crawlers as an empty container. Fetch your own page with curl and read what comes back.
• Attribution on the page. A named author, a date, an organisation. An engine deciding between two useful pages often prefers the one it can characterise.
• An extractable answer. One sentence, near a matching heading, that states the thing directly. Generative engine optimization covers what that looks like.

Working through it without drowning

Do not fix page by page. Group by cause. Two hundred pages missing a description is one template change, not two hundred tasks. Order by severity multiplied by pages affected, and the cheap site-wide wins come first.

The free Crawld scan grades these elements as part of a 129-check rubric and reports what it could not measure rather than counting it as a pass. The full rubric is published by category, and the audit page explains what a finding contains.

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