On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing the content and structure of an individual page so both search engines and users can understand it clearly. This includes everything from heading structures and keyword placement to internal links, semantic HTML, and image optimization. Strong on-page SEO improves relevance, clarity, and usability, and all of these directly influence ranking potential.
This guide walks through the core principles and provides fifteen practical examples you can apply to any page. These best practices help you create content that is more understandable, more helpful, and more competitive in search results.
What Is On-Page SEO
On page SEO is the process of improving the content, structure, and technical elements of a single page so that algorithms can interpret it accurately and users can move through it easily. While SEO has many parts, on page work is foundational. Without optimized content and structure your pages cannot perform well regardless of backlinks or off page signals. With on-page SEO, you focus on clarity, relevance, structure, internal linking, and usability. Search engines reward pages that are logically structured, thorough, and properly aligned with user intent.
Why On-Page SEO Is Important
On-page SEO matters because it signals both relevance and quality. When a page matches a search query and offers a great user experience, rankings naturally improve. On page SEO also increases engagement, reduces bounce rates, and strengthens conversion rates. On-page work directly supports all other SEO efforts because search engines evaluate content quality first before weighing total authority.
Learning about SEO is one of the most important things you can do for your website. Once you understand how search engines work you can ensure your content is able to get in front of more users. But considering that on-page work is so important to a healthy optimization strategy, let’s learn about current best practices when focusing on on-page optimizations.
On-Page Best Practices For Optimizing Your Content
- Keyword Research
- Keyword Placement
- Optimizing Your URL
- Optimizing Title Tags
- Using Meta Descriptions
- Optimizing Heading Structures
- Writing High Quality Content
- Targeting Featured Snippets
- Utilizing Semantic HTML Elements
- Implementing Schema Markup
- Building Relevant Internal Linking Structures
- Building Great External Links
- Optimizing Images
- Improving Page Speed
- Maximizing User Engagement
Keyword Research
The first step in a good on-page strategy is keyword research. This reveals what your audience searches for, how competitors structure their content, and which terms belong in primary and secondary positions. A strong keyword list becomes your roadmap for depth, structure, and content direction. Once you’ve completed your keyword research, you should even be able to flesh out quality content calendars to know which topics you need to be creating pages for, and you’ll even know roughly what types of returns you can expect from your efforts.
If you need a great resource to learn more about keywords, head over to our complete keyword guide to learn more.
Keyword Placement
When placing keywords you need to ensure you have your primary keyword naturally included in your headings - especially your H1, your URL, title tag, paragraphs, and even image file names, alt tags, bold/strong text, etc. There are many places you need to include your primary and secondary keywords, and a variety of keyword variations. Search has evolved tremendously, and it isn’t about keyword density or keyword stuffing, but more about proper placement. To learn more about keyword placement, head over to our guide.
Optimizing Your URL
When optimizing your URLs, make sure to include your primary keyword in the URL. Your URL should tell users and search engines what the page is about.
A flat URL structure keeps everything on the same level, which is simple but not descriptive. Flat structures are also harder to maintain when it comes to building internal links, as there is no organization, and it quickly becomes messy and hard to navigate as the website maintainer.
Hierarchical structures organize topics in a way that is easier for users and search engines to interpret. Structuring things in this way naturally supports topical authority and makes larger content systems easier to understand at a quick glance for users and search engines alike.
Neither structure is bad for SEO, but hierarchical structures help to organize content and build topical authority more easily. Hierarchical structures are also easier to maintain
Optimizing Title Tags
Ensure your title tags include your primary keyword while also being compelling for those seeing your title tag in search results. Your title tag functions as both an SEO signal and a reason for users to click your page. A clear, compelling title increases click through rate and improves ranking potential. Because the title tag appears in search results, clarity and relevance are more important than marketing language.
Using Meta Descriptions
Ensure meta descriptions make users want to click through to read more. Optimizing meta descriptions is more about improving your CTR (click through rates) than it is about having your primary keyword included. Because meta descriptions do not directly affect rankings, you don’t necessarily need your primary or secondary keywords to be included.
The main thing to consider regarding meta descriptions is that you write a clear description that summarizes the value of the page so users are curious enough to click. They should convey to users exactly what to expect on your page, and you need to make sure you aren’t letting them down with a promise you didn’t fulfill.
Optimizing Heading Structures
Make sure you include your primary and secondary keywords throughout your headings in a natural way. You also need to ensure your headings are ordered properly too. The H1 should reflect the overall topic of the page. H2s divide major sections. H3s and lower headings break down subsections. Proper hierarchy is essential because search engines evaluate context and relevancy by analyzing how headings relate to one another. Google patents confirm that heading structure influences how relevant a page appears for certain queries. Always use one H1, never skip heading levels, and ensure heading wording aligns with the meaning of the section.
Writing High Quality Content
Write quality content that is thorough, original, clearly and logically structured, and aligned with user intent. When writing your content, you want to anticipate the questions readers have and answer them completely. The length of the content depends entirely on the depth required to be competitive for the topic, so you’ll base the length on your top competitors for each page.
Targeting Featured Snippets
Search engines reward well structured and scannable content with featured snippets. When content is organized with definitions, short explanations, and direct answers, search engines can more easily extract useful passages. Heading clarity and consistent formatting support this. Schema can also help more of your information and content to get extracted and displayed in search results. The more real estate you take in search engines, the higher your CTR will be. Though, there is no guarantee that you will secure a featured snippet, these things simply help improve the chances that your content is selected.
Utilizing Semantic HTML Elements
Semantic HTML clarifies structure and meaning for search engines. Avoid building pages with generic div elements for everything, sometimes called ‘div soup’. Instead, use elements like main, article, section, nav, figure, footer, and others when appropriate. Semantic HTML improves accessibility and helps search engines & AI crawl and understand the structure and purpose of your pages and the relationships between the sections on your pages.
Implementing Schema Markup
Schema markup provides explicit information about the content and entities on your page. Because modern search engines cannot understand language in the way we can, they instead rely on a semantic understanding of languages. This involves determining which entities are on a page, understanding the relationships between each entity, and how related your page is to the entities being discussed. The more relevant your page is, the higher you will rank.
Schema improves your relevance to the entities you’re discussing by simply helping and explicitly communicating which entities your page is focused on. Schema can also increase the chances of appearing in enhanced results like featured snippets. Considering many websites skip Schema entirely, implementing this alone gives you an advantage that most of your competitors are not utilizing.
Building Relevant Internal Linking Structures
When creating content for your website, you should always be thinking about how you can link related pages together. When writing content, you’ll want to look places you can link out to pages related to what is being discussed on the page being written. Then you’ll build an internal link pointing to that related page.
When building internal links, make sure you do not use the exact primary keyword of the page being linked out to, and avoid using the same anchor text more than 2-3 times on other pages of your website. A quality website should follow proper internal linking practices which will lead to authority and link juice being passed around effectively to every important page of your website.
Creating Useful External Links
When linking to an external domain would be beneficial to users, or strengthen the relevance of your page, build an anchor pointing to that domain.
Optimizing Images
Compress images to have small file sizes while also retaining great image quality. Ensure images have useful file names that include your primary or secondary keywords. Ensure alt tags are helpful for users with disabilities. If possible, you can also include your primary or secondary keywords in the alt tag, but the main purpose of alt tags is to include useful text for accessibility purposes.
We recommend either using Python to optimize images in bulk, or using a website like Squoosh. Which format you use will depend on your situation, but .webp is quickly becoming the standard for both quality and file size.
Improving Page Speed
Page speed impacts both user experience and rankings. Speed can be improved by reducing unused code, optimizing images, limiting heavy scripts, and using efficient HTML structures. Tools like Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights can help identify bottlenecks and provide actionable next steps.
Maximizing User Engagement
Engagement signals such as scroll depth, session duration, and bounce rate (how quickly users leave your pages) influence rankings. Engagement improves when content is readable, structured well, and aligned with intent. Tools like Google Search Console, analytics platforms, and heatmaps or recorded user sessions reveal where users hesitate or exit. Adjustments should be made based on real user data to improve engagement.
What Are Other Ways To Optimize Your Content
Beyond the core on-page methods we’ve discussed, there are other improvements that make your content clearer, easier to understand, and more aligned with how search engines evaluate relevance. These optimizations help both users and algorithms interpret your message with greater accuracy.
Improve Usability
Ensuring predictable navigation, readable typography, consistent spacing, and clear structural cues is one of the best ways to improve usability. Most websites aren’t built utilizing standard design conventions. Ensuring your website follows best-practices for modern web design will help to ensure both users and search engines alike have no issue navigating, understanding, and using your website.
Even using non-design-related features like breadcrumbs can help to make navigating easier for search and users alike.
Preserve Context By Sticking To One Topic
Every page should revolve around a single core topic or entity. When too many unrelated ideas appear on a page, the relevance to the primary topic you want to rank for becomes diluted and search engines have a harder time assigning the page to a specific query space. All examples, explanations, and supporting information should tie back to the central topic. This preserves contextual purity, which is required for strong rankings.
Understand and Utilize Main and Supplementary Content Sections
If skewing slightly off topic will truly help improve the user’s understanding, the best place for that is the supplementary content section. There are two sections on any given webpage. A main content section, which focuses entirely on the primary entity the page is targeting, and a supplementary content section which is for related but secondary information. The information contained in the supplementary section should be related to the content covered in the main section, but also help to expand upon it in some way, and without shifting focus. The supplementary section also needs to be much smaller than the main content, otherwise you will skew the focus of the page, and relevancy will be diluted.
How Do You Know When Optimizations Are Complete
Once a page satisfies search intent, comprehensively covers the primary entity or topic, and it is more comprehensive and logically structured than any top-ranking competing pages, it is safe to consider it completely optimized as far as on-page SEO is considered. Though, more improvements can still be made in other aspects of SEO like technical or off-page SEO.
That said, based on external metrics provided by Google Search Console, GA4, various third-party tools like Ahrefs, etc., you’ll want to continue making adjustments to the page to improve CTR, conversions, and other important metrics.
What Other Types of Optimizations Should You Focus On
Beyond content and structure, you should also consider how quickly your pages load, how well your internal linking directs authority from your homepage or other important pillar pages, and how intuitive your overall site architecture is. These reinforce topical relevance and help search engines evaluate your site as a unified system as opposed to viewing it as a group of unrelated documents.
Technical SEO Optimizations
Technical SEO affects discoverability and indexation. Clean HTML, schema, efficient crawling paths, properly structured XML sitemaps, and optimized page performance ensure that search engines can access and interpret your content easily and efficiently. You want to improve indexation, crawl budgets, trust, and relevance, and technical optimizations are the way to ensure you achieve just that.
Off Page SEO Optimizations
Off page SEO is more of a marketing effort than an optimization in some cases. You’ll improve your website by increasing your authority. You’ll increase your authority by earning mentions, links, and citations from reputable and most importantly, relevant sources. When trustworthy sites reference your content, search engines view your pages as more trustworthy, as they are direct signs other trusted websites are willing to publicly express their approval of you and what you are doing. Off page signals complement on page signals by demonstrating that others find your content valuable enough to reference.
You can rank without off page SEO in less competitive spaces, but without a solid off-page strategy, you will not rank in search results that are moderately to extremely competitive.
Answer Engine Optimization
Answer engines are a relatively new method of optimization. AEO or answer engine optimization focuses on listening to what the patents say regarding how they come to understand and weigh the content on a website. By listening to what is mentioned you can ensure your website is getting referenced in non-click environments like Google’s AI overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools. AEO involves things like not adding fluff or filler text, making your headings questions and then immediately providing a comprehensive answer to that question. Answer engines can then more easily find answers to user’s queries, which will be extracted from your website and displayed to someone using AI. Your website will be mentioned and shared with the user as a result.
When you are crafting your heading structures, anticipate the questions your users will have so you can include them in your headings, and in your content as a whole. Doing this is a great way to ensure you are optimizing your content for answer engines.
Improve Your On Page SEO With Award Winning Professionals
If you want to improve your online presence by optimizing your website for search and answer engines, give us a call or learn more about the SEO services we offer. As an award-winning SEO, design & Webflow development company, we would love to help get your business in front of more customers each month!