On-Page Basics

Track 1 · Lesson 3 of 6 · about 15 minutes

On-page basics

On-page work is not decoration applied after writing. It is the structure that lets a machine — and a person skimming in four seconds — work out what the page is for and whether it answers their question.

The title tag

The title is the strongest single on-page description of what a page covers, and usually the first thing a searcher reads. Put the distinctive part first, keep it a genuine description rather than a keyword list, and accept that Google rewrites titles when it thinks something else fits the query better. A rewrite is not a penalty; it is usually a hint that the original was truncated, boilerplate-heavy, or a weak match.

The meta description

It is not a ranking factor and it is frequently rewritten. It is still worth writing, because when it does get used it is your advert. Describe what the reader gets, not what the page contains. “How to find every broken link and decide which ones to redirect” beats “This article discusses broken links”.

Headings

One H1, matching the page’s actual subject. Then H2s for the real sections and H3s beneath them, nested honestly. Headings are how a screen-reader user navigates, how a skimmer navigates, and how a retrieval system decides which chunk of a page answers which sub-question. Choosing a heading level for its font size is the fastest way to wreck all three at once.

The opening paragraph does the heavy lifting

Answer the question the title implies, in the first forty to sixty words, in plain language. Then expand. This is old advice for readers and newly urgent for retrieval, because a passage that stands on its own is the one that can be lifted into an answer. A paragraph that only makes sense after three paragraphs of context is nearly unquotable, however good it is.

The discipline is uncomfortable at first — it means giving away the answer before the build-up — but the build-up was never why anyone stayed.

Images

Alt text describes the image for someone who cannot see it. That is the whole job. If the image is decorative, an empty alt attribute is correct and better than inventing a description. Beyond accessibility, the practical wins are file size and dimensions: an oversized hero image is one of the most common causes of a poor Largest Contentful Paint, and an image without width and height attributes is a classic layout-shift culprit.

Internal links, written properly

Anchor text tells the engine what the destination is about, so “read more” and “click here” throw away the signal. Link with the phrase that describes the target. Link from within the body text where the reference is genuinely relevant, not only from a related-posts strip at the bottom, which every page has and which therefore distinguishes nothing.

What not to bother with

Keyword density has no target. The meta keywords tag has been ignored for well over a decade. Exact-match repetition of a phrase reads badly to humans and buys nothing from machines. If a sentence exists to hold a keyword, delete it — you will lose nothing and gain a page someone can read.

Going deeper: SEO fundamentals · the GEO and AEO guide · try Would AI cite this?