On-page SEO is the backbone of any successful search strategy, giving us complete control over how well our content ranks and engages users.
It’s WAY more than just adding keywords—it’s about crafting high-quality, user-first content, optimising technical elements, and ensuring a seamless experience across all devices.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the essential on-page SEO factors, from title tags and internal linking to Core Web Vitals and schema markup, with actionable tips to help boost rankings and drive organic traffic.
Whether you’re refining existing pages or building a site from scratch, these insights will help you optimise effectively and stay ahead in an ever-evolving search landscape.
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages to improve search engine rankings and enhance user experience.
It involves refining elements like content, meta tags, URLs, and internal links to make a page more relevant and valuable for both users and search engines. Unlike off-page SEO, which focuses on backlinks and external signals, on-page SEO gives us direct control over how well our content performs.
Importance of On-Page SEO
On-page SEO plays a crucial role in how well our content ranks and how users experience our site.
Search engines assess factors like keyword relevance, content structure, and technical elements to determine whether a page deserves a top spot in search results. But it’s not just about rankings—it’s about creating a smooth and engaging experience for visitors.
When we optimise headings, improve readability, and ensure fast loading speeds, we keep users interested and encourage them to stay longer. The better the experience, the more likely they are to convert—and that’s a win for both SEO and our business.
Essential On-Page SEO Elements
1) Title Tags
Title tags are the first thing people see in search results, so they need to be clear, engaging, and keyword-rich. They tell search engines and users what a page is about, and a well-optimised title can make the difference between someone clicking on your site or scrolling past.
2) Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are those short blurbs under the title in search results, acting like a mini sales pitch for your page. While they don’t directly affect rankings, a compelling, well-written description can grab attention, improve click-through rates, and encourage users to explore your content.
3) Header Tags
Header tags (H1-H6) help structure your content, making it easier to read and scan. They also give search engines a clear hierarchy of information, which improves SEO. When used strategically, headers keep readers engaged and guide them smoothly through your page.
4) URL Structure
A well-structured URL makes it easier for both search engines and users to understand what your page is about. Short, clean URLs with relevant keywords not only look better but also improve SEO, making your content more discoverable and user-friendly.
5) Internal Links
Internal links create pathways between different pages on your site, improving navigation and keeping visitors engaged longer. They also help search engines understand the structure of your site, boosting SEO by passing authority between pages and encouraging deeper exploration.
6) Images
Images aren’t just there to make a page look good—they enhance user experience, break up large chunks of text, and support SEO when optimised correctly.
Top On-Page SEO Optimisation Tips
1) Keyword Research and Placement
Understanding what your audience is searching for is the foundation of strong on-page SEO. By identifying the right target keywords—those with high relevance, search volume, and intent—we can create content that aligns with user needs and ranks well in search results.
The key is to find a balance between short-tail (and typically more generic) and long-tail keywords (typically more specific) to capture both general and niche search queries.
Once we have our target keywords, strategic placement is crucial.
Instead of stuffing them unnaturally, we weave them into essential areas like headings, the first 100 words, subheadings, and naturally throughout the content. This helps search engines understand our page’s relevance while keeping the writing smooth and engaging for readers.
2) Write an Engaging Page Title and Optimise it with Target Keywords
A great page title does two things: grabs attention and helps search engines understand the topic. Titles should be clear, compelling, and include the primary keyword naturally.
The goal is to entice clicks while making sure the title aligns with the content. Keeping it under 60 characters prevents it from getting cut off in search results.
Beyond keywords, adding power words or numbers (like “Ultimate” or “Top 10”) can make titles more engaging. It’s also a good idea to front-load important keywords so they’re visible even if the title gets truncated. A well-optimised title tag increases click-through rates and sets the right expectations for visitors.
At First Page Digital Singapore, we used the term “Award Winning” in the title of our homepage. Google hasn’t rewritten it yet so we’re definitely doing something right.
3) Write an Compelling Meta Description it with Primary and Secondary Keywords
Meta descriptions act as mini-advertisements for our pages, influencing whether users click through. A strong meta description should summarise the page’s value in a way that’s engaging and informative.
Including primary and secondary keywords naturally signals relevance to search engines without looking spammy.
The ideal length for a meta description is around 150-160 characters. It should be persuasive, clear, and action-driven, encouraging users to learn more.
Phrases like “Find out how,” “Discover the best,” or “Learn more about” can make descriptions more enticing. While meta descriptions don’t directly impact rankings, they play a vital role in driving traffic and engagement.
4) Content Quality and Relevance
Search engines are getting smarter, and ranking well today means writing for people first—not just algorithms.
High-quality, engaging content that provides real value is the foundation of great on-page SEO. It’s not enough to simply include keywords; our content needs to be original, well-researched, and informative.
When we focus on solving real problems, answering user questions, and creating content that’s genuinely helpful, we naturally attract more traffic, build trust, and encourage shares.
The more useful and unique our content is, the better it performs in search rankings and the more likely it is to gain traction.
But it’s not just about good writing—it’s about understanding user intent and aligning our content with what people are actually searching for. Whether users need a quick answer, a deep dive, or product recommendations, our content should match their expectations.
Following Google’s E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), we ensure credibility by providing accurate, up-to-date information.
This means fact-checking, citing reputable sources, and keeping our content fresh. The goal isn’t just to rank—it’s to create valuable, authoritative content that keeps users coming back.
Check out Google’s Content Quality Guidelines: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
5) Showcase your Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness
Google places a strong emphasis on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness), especially for YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) niches like finance, health, and legal topics.
If we want our content to rank well and be seen as credible, we need to demonstrate our expertise through well-researched, fact-checked information. This includes citing reputable sources, adding author bios, and showcasing real-world experience or case studies that reinforce our authority.
Optimising for E-E-A-T isn’t just about credibility—it’s also about user trust. Clear, transparent content with a professional tone, accurate data, and helpful insights can make all the difference.
Regularly updating content, displaying credentials (e.g. author bios), and building high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites further strengthens our trust signals. The more we establish ourselves as a reliable source, the more likely we are to rank well and attract engaged readers.
6) Structure Your Content Properly with Appropriate Header Tags
A well-structured page isn’t just easier to read—it’s easier for search engines to understand.
Using hierarchical header tags (H1-H6) helps break up content into digestible sections, making it more scannable and improving user experience. A strong structure also signals to search engines which parts of our content are most important, increasing relevance for key topics.
Best practices for header tags include using only one H1 per page (typically the main title), breaking down content with H2s and H3s, and naturally incorporating keywords where relevant. This structure makes it easier for both users and search engines to navigate our content, improving engagement and ranking potential.
Oh! And note that your H1 and page title can be different as long as they have identical intent. So if your page title is “Blog SEO: Top Tips For Optimising Your Blog Articles”, you can use the following as H1s:
- Blog SEO: Essential Strategies to Optimise Your Blog for Search Engines
- How to Optimise Your Blog Articles for SEO: Top Expert Tips
- SEO for Blogs: Proven Techniques to Boost Your Blog’s Rankings
- Blog SEO Best Practices: How to Optimise Your Articles for Maximum Visibility
- Mastering Blog SEO: Actionable Tips to Improve Your Blog’s Search Performance
7) Create User-friendly and Succinct URLs
A clean, well-structured URL isn’t just good for SEO—it also improves user experience. When URLs are short, descriptive, and free from unnecessary characters or numbers, they become easier to read and remember.
A clear URL gives users and search engines an instant idea of what the page is about, increasing click-through rates and credibility.
Including relevant keywords in URLs can also boost rankings, but they should be used naturally. Avoid stuffing them with unnecessary words—keep it simple, relevant, and aligned with the page’s content.
Say you are writing a blog post about about the benefits of SEO, a good URL would be something like example.com/blog/benefits-of-seo
Optimise Your Images
Images play a key role in making content visually appealing and engaging, but if they’re not optimised properly, they can slow down a site and hurt SEO.
Using descriptive file names and alt text helps search engines understand what an image is about, improving visibility in image searches and making content more accessible.
Compressing images is equally important for maintaining fast page load speeds. Large, unoptimised images can lead to sluggish performance, which frustrates users and negatively impacts rankings.
By using formats like WebP and keeping file sizes manageable, we can strike the perfect balance between quality and performance.
8) Have a Robust Internal Linking Strategy
Source: Ahrefs
Internal linking is often overlooked, but it’s a game-changer for SEO and user experience. By linking to relevant pages within our website, we help users navigate content more easily and encourage them to spend more time on our site. This also distributes link equity, ensuring that important pages get the visibility they deserve.
From an SEO perspective, internal links help search engines understand site structure and content relationships.
This is particularly important for establishing topical relevance between a piece of hub content (e.g. what is SEO) and its corresponding more granular cluster content (e.g. SEO vs PPC).
A strong linking strategy improves crawlability and helps Googlebot discover your content better and faster. This is especially important for new pages. The key is to be intentional—link to relevant pages naturally, use descriptive anchor text, and avoid excessive linking that feels forced.
Actual content on the page aside, here are some other places I’d recommend including an internal link to core pages:
- Navigation menu at the top of the site
- Footer menu
9) Don’t Neglect External Links
External links are links that point from our website to another. They act as references, adding credibility and context to our content. When we link to authoritative and relevant sources, we enhance trustworthiness and show that our content is well-researched, which is a positive ranking signal.
Best practices for external linking include choosing reputable sources, linking naturally within content, and avoiding excessive outbound links that may dilute authority. While some worry about linking to other websites, the reality is that well-placed external links showcase your credibility and trustworthiness by adding value and context for users.
10) Check Back on Published Content and Fill your content gaps When Necessary
Search rankings aren’t set in stone—Google constantly updates results based on user behaviour, click-through rates, and content quality. Just because a page ranks well today doesn’t mean it always will.
In an analysis of Google’s leaked documents from May 2024, New York City-based agency iPullRank revealed that Google tracks user interactions. Some of these include clicks and time spent on a page. These metrics will then be used to assess relevance. This means a couple of things:
- Your content needs to closely match the intent of the search query to keep readers engaged and stay longer on your page
- Your content needs to have a unique angle to stand out among competitors
- Knowing that SERPs are not static, you’ll need to revisit and improve published content regularly to ensure that their search intent still matches that of the target keyword you were trying to rank for
Using tools like Ahrefs, we can analyse keyword trends, track ranking shifts, and identify content gaps. As you can see in the graph above, Ahrefs has this SERP history feature if you scroll down after searching a particular keyword. Each line represents a single web page and the entire graph indicates how stable or unstable the SERP is for that particular keyword.
Refreshing outdated sections, adding new insights, and aligning with evolving search intent can help regain lost rankings. A proactive approach to content optimisation keeps our pages relevant, ensuring they continue to attract traffic and provide value over time.
11) Make Your Page Mobile-friendly
With mobile traffic dominating search, ensuring a responsive design isn’t optional—it’s essential.
A mobile-friendly site adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes, providing a smooth and accessible experience for users on smartphones and tablets. And you can check this by viewing the source code of your page, or the rendered HTML by right-clicking your page and then clicking inspect.
I always check whether or not the viewport meta tag is set to width=device-width. This ensures that your site is responsive and not adaptive.
Also, if visitors struggle to navigate a page due to poor design, slow load times, or unclickable elements, they’ll bounce—and Google takes note of that.
Mobile optimisation directly impacts SEO rankings, as search engines prioritise mobile-first indexing. To check if a site is mobile-friendly, real-time testing on different devices can he helpful after Google retired its Mobile-Friendly Test.
A well-optimised mobile site isn’t just good for SEO—it keeps visitors engaged and converting.
12) Optimise Your Site for Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals measure real-world user experience, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Google considers these factors crucial for on-page SEO because they directly impact engagement and satisfaction.
If a page takes too long to load, shifts unexpectedly, or lags when users try to interact with it, rankings (and conversions) will take a hit.
Improving Core Web Vitals involves optimising images, minimising unnecessary scripts, and leveraging browser caching to enhance loading times.
Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse provide detailed reports on site performance, helping pinpoint and fix speed-related issues. Prioritising Core Web Vitals isn’t just about SEO—it’s about creating a frustration-free browsing experience that keeps users coming back.
13) Enrich your rich results with schema markup
Rich results make search listings more engaging by adding extra details like star ratings and product price ranges. Just take a look at the star ratings on the rich results of an article from the First Page Digital Singapore blog
These enhancements help a page stand out in search results, increasing visibility and click-through rates. Google uses structured data (schema markup) to understand content better and present relevant rich results to users.
Implementing schema markup is easier than it sounds. Using tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, you can validate the schema markups you craft to check for errors. Alternatively, you can use schema.org
We can add schema types relevant to our content—whether it’s product pages, articles, recipes, or events. The more context we give search engines, the better our chances of appearing in rich snippets, driving more organic traffic to our site.
14) Analyse your site’s existing pages to avoid content duplication
Content duplication happens when similar or identical content appears on multiple pages within a site or across different domains. While not always a penalty-worthy issue, duplicate content can confuse search engines, making it difficult for them to decide which version to rank.
This can dilute visibility, reduce organic traffic, and, in some cases, lead to lower rankings if search engines consider it an attempt to manipulate results. To avoid these issues, we should regularly audit our site’s content using the various tools.
14.1) Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog has a report that allows you to quickly see which pages have been identified as duplicates or near-duplicates. Just click on the “content” tab and look at the more granular reports.
14.2) Google Search Console (GSC)
GSC can also be used to identify near-duplicates.
Say you are running a site for freelance writing services and you want to check if you have existing pages already performing for the keyword “content writing”. All you need to do is just key in that keyword in the query filter and look at the clicks and impressions metrics for all the URLs that show up.
If the clicks and impressions for multiple URLs are around the same range, odds are, Google views them as near duplicate content. And in that case, it’s good to start pruning your content.
Now, do note that Google will test each piece of content of your site on the SERPs of various keywords. Even if the search intent of your content and those queries don’t match. That’s why you’ll notice that your pages will show an initial growth in clicks and impressions for queries with different intent, before showing a fall in traffic from those keywords.
14.3) site: Search Operator
The last method I want to recommend is probably the easiest.
All you need to do is just use the site: search operator for a keyword you want to target. Say “content seo”. Based on Google’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, it is able to understand your query and return results with intent that most closely matches that of your keyword. And the site: search operator ensures that the results are pages coming only from your site.
By analysing the page titles of the results alone, you can quickly identify duplicate or near-duplicate content on your page.
Elevate Your On-Page SEO for Long-Term Success
Mastering on-page SEO isn’t just about ticking boxes—it’s about creating valuable, user-first content that search engines love.
From crafting compelling titles and optimising meta descriptions to refining site structure and improving Core Web Vitals, every element plays a role in boosting visibility and engagement.
But SEO isn’t a one-and-done process—staying ahead means continuously updating content, tracking performance, and adapting to search engine updates.
By implementing these actionable tips and focusing on quality, relevance, and user experience, we can build a strong SEO foundation that drives sustainable traffic and long-term success.
