On-Page SEO: The Eight Things That Actually Matter

Most on-page SEO checklists have forty items, and thirty of them stopped mattering years ago. Here are the eight that do, roughly in order of impact.

1. Title tag

The highest-leverage element on the page. It affects ranking and whether anyone clicks the result.

• Put the primary term near the front, naturally
• Around 50–60 characters before truncation
• Written for a human, not assembled from keywords
• Unique across the site — duplicate titles compete with each other

| Weak | Better | |---|---| | SEO Tips | Company Name | On-Page SEO: The 8 Things That Actually Matter | | Services - Consulting - Company | Fractional CFO Services for Agencies Under £2m |

The title is also what appears in AI answer citations, so vagueness costs twice.

2. Answer the query in the first hundred words

Both readers and AI summaries take the answer from near the top. Burying it under three paragraphs of preamble costs you both.

State the answer, then expand. If the query is "how long does X take", the first sentence should contain a duration.

This is why a key takeaways box or summary near the top works well — it puts the extractable answer where extraction happens.

3. Heading structure

One H1, matching the page's subject. Then H2s for the major sections.

The useful part: write your H2s as the sub-questions people actually search. Those headings get extracted into featured snippets and AI answers, and they help readers scan.

If "people also ask" shows four related questions, those are four H2s.

Don't skip levels — H2 to H4 with no H3 between confuses the structure for anything parsing it.

4. URL

Short, readable, containing the main term.

Good:  /marketing/on-page-seo
Poor:  /blog/2026/09/post-4471-seo-tips-and-tricks

Never date-stamp URLs. It kills evergreen updates — a piece you refresh in 2028 shouldn't have 2026 in its address.

And once published, don't change URLs casually. If you must, redirect the old one.

5. Internal links

Both directions, on every page:

• Up to the hub or guide the page belongs to
• Across to two to four genuinely related pages
• Down from hubs to their supporting pages

Use descriptive anchor text — "how to price your services", not "click here". The anchor text tells search engines what the destination page is about.

This matters more than most people assume, and it's covered properly in internal linking.

6. Images

• Descriptive filenames — gross-margin-example.png, not IMG_4471.png
• Alt text that describes the image, written for someone who can't see it. It's an accessibility requirement first and an SEO benefit second.
• Compressed, and sized correctly. Page speed is a ranking factor and images are usually the biggest cost.

7. Meta description

Doesn't directly affect ranking. Does affect click-through, which affects whether the ranking is worth anything.

Write it as ad copy: what the reader gets, in about 150 characters, including the term naturally because matched words get bolded in results.

Search engines frequently rewrite it anyway. Write one regardless — when it's used, it's the difference between a click and a scroll.

8. Freshness signals

Not a trick — a genuine one. Show when the page was last updated, and actually update it.

For anything where facts change — prices, rules, tools, figures — a visible recent date affects both ranking and reader trust. A page dated three years ago gets less benefit of the doubt regardless of quality.

What to ignore

Still in checklists, still worthless:

• Keyword density. Not a thing. Write naturally.
• Meta keywords tag. Ignored by every major search engine for well over a decade.
• Exact-match repetition. Repeating the phrase verbatim reads badly and helps nothing.
• Word count targets. Length should match what the query needs. Padding to hit 2,000 words makes the page worse.
• Stuffing the term into every heading. Obvious, and it degrades readability.

Structured data, briefly

Worth adding where it genuinely applies:

• Article on articles
• FAQPage where there's a real FAQ section
• HowTo for genuine step-by-step processes
• Product / Review for product pages
• BreadcrumbList for navigation

It doesn't directly improve ranking, but it enables rich results, which improves click-through. Only mark up what's actually on the page — marking up content that isn't there is a policy violation, not a shortcut.

The order to fix things

If you have a page that isn't performing:

1. Check intent first. Wrong page type is a rewrite, not a fix — see search intent
2. Title tag — highest leverage single change
3. Answer near the top — helps ranking, snippets and readers at once
4. Headings as sub-questions
5. Internal links in and out
6. Everything else

Fixing images and meta descriptions on a page with the wrong intent is rearranging furniture.

The mistakes

1. Optimising a page with the wrong intent. Nothing else matters.
2. Titles written for engines, not people. They affect clicks too.
3. Burying the answer. Costs snippets and readers simultaneously.
4. Generic anchor text. "Click here" tells nothing.
5. Chasing word count. Padding makes pages worse.
6. Marking up content that isn't there. A violation, not a tactic.

What to do next

Take your five most important pages and check just two things: does the title contain the term near the front and read well to a human, and is the answer to the query in the first hundred words.

Those two changes on five pages will do more than a full audit of forty checklist items.