On-Page SEO: The Practical Guide

This is a follow-up to my general SEO guide. If you haven't read it yet, go back and give it a go.

What is on-page SEO? As the name suggests, it's everything that is on your website. Which is also the good news, because unlike the other half, this part is entirely under your control. Nobody else has a say in this.

Read on and I'll give you a checklist to run your own site through at the end.

Three questions. That's the whole thing.

Can Google reach your site? Does Google understand what you do? Does the visitor get what they came for?

Everything below fits into one of those.

1. Can Google reach your site at all?

This one is short, and it goes first, because if the answer is no then nothing else on this page matters. You can write the best service page in your city and it will sit there unread.

• Is your site crawlable? Nothing in robots.txt quietly blocking half of it. No pages that exist but have no link pointing at them.
• Is it indexable? Not the same question. A page can be crawled and still be told not to show up. Stray noindex tags, canonicals pointing somewhere strange, a sitemap that either doesn't exist or was never submitted.
• Is the mobile version good? Google indexes that one, not your desktop version. If your site was designed on a big monitor and never checked on a phone, check it on a phone.
• Does it load reasonably fast? At this stage that mostly means: compress your images, and don't run twelve scripts you don't need.

None of this is glamorous. It's the plumbing. But this is the layer where the boot-on-the-head problems live.

2. Does Google understand what you do?

This is the big one.

Start with the words you use to describe yourself. Not the clever ones. The obvious ones.

We all want to sound unique, and sometimes we push it so far that nobody can tell what we actually sell. If your homepage says you are "a boutique studio crafting bespoke digital experiences," that could be a web agency, a photographer, or a UX designer. Say what you do. You can be charming in the second sentence.

Sometimes we have a hard time hitting exactly the way people search for things — even I'm sometimes surprised by what most people say to convey their meaning. That's why we should always ground our understanding in proper keyword research, which I will cover in future episodes.

Then, and most people skip this entirely: your title tags and meta descriptions.

Every page gets one title. It's the line Google leans on hardest to work out what the page is about, and it's the line a human actually clicks in the results. It is probably the highest-value line of text on the whole page, and most small business sites have twenty pages all titled "Home."

Headings next. Use them to describe what's underneath, not because you wanted bigger text. This is one of the rare things that helps bots and humans in exactly the same way.

Add schema where it fits. Local business, product, article, whatever matches you. You don't need to hand-write it and you don't need all of it. Pick the type that describes your business, add it, run it through a validator, move on.

Images: give them real file names and real alt text. "ski-boot-fitting-boston.jpg" beats "IMG_4471.jpg". Takes seconds and it feeds your speed and accessibility at the same time.

And finally, depth. This is the "topical authority" thing you've heard about, and it's simpler than it sounds. One thin page about a subject is not coverage of that subject. If you fit ski boots, one paragraph about boot fitting is not going to convince anyone, machine or human, that you are the boot fitting people in Boston. Cover it properly. Yes, this overlaps with off-page, because other sites linking to you for a topic is the other half of that signal. We'll get to it in the next lesson.

3. Does the visitor get what they came for?

Here's the mistake I see most often, and it's not technical at all.

Someone searching "ski boots" wants to browse and buy. Someone searching "how to fit ski boots" wants to read and learn. These are different people with different needs, and if you answer the first one with a blog post and the second one with a product grid, you lose both. Look at what the query actually wants before you decide what kind of page to build.

Then answer fast. If someone lands on your page with a question, the answer should be visible without scrolling past your company history. Nobody came for your company history.

Link related things together. If you have a guide on boot fitting and a page selling boot fitting, they should point at each other. It helps people move around, and it's how crawlers work out which of your pages belong to the same topic. It's also a signal that you understand your own niche and properly thought out your content. It's now easier than ever to do proper interlinking!

Have the pages people expect to find. Delivery terms if you ship. Returns. TOS. Contact information that is a real address and a real phone number, not just a form.

And have the pages that say who you are. About page, real names, credentials, faces. Going back to the lawyer from the last guide: this is the equivalent of the diploma on the wall. You'd notice if it wasn't there.

The checklist

Run your site through this. Every "no" is a job. I ordered them from most important to least important.

• robots.txt isn't blocking anything you want indexed
• Sitemap exists and is submitted in Search Console
• No accidental noindex tags on pages you want ranking
• Every page has a unique title tag that describes the page
• Site works properly on a phone
• Your homepage says what you actually do, in plain words
• Contact, TOS, delivery and returns pages exist
• About page with real names and credentials
• Page type matches what the search was looking for
• One H1 per page, describing the page
• Your main topics have real depth, not one thin page each
• Related pages link to each other
• The answer to the query is visible without scrolling
• Headings used for structure, not for font size
• Every page has a meta description
• Schema added and validated
• Images are compressed and named sensibly
• Every image has alt text

That's on-page. All of it is in your hands, which makes it the half worth fixing first. Next up: the half you don't control.