On Page SEO Checklist: 17 Ways to Optimize Your Page

On Page SEO Checklist

If you’re just getting the hang of all the things that go into an optimized webpage, there’s no doubt the list can be overwhelming.

What is on-page SEO?

On-Page SEO refers to the process of making your pages appeal to both search engines and human. It reviews and improves both the public face of your website and the behind the scenes coding and technical set-up that only search engines see.

on-page SEO is the foundation on which your website must be constructed for better search engine ranking.

In this article, I’ll show you an On-Page SEO Checklist and This checklist can help you improve organic traffic, drive leads and improve your position in search engine results?

1. Title Tag

Ensure each page has a unique and descriptive title. A title is the most important on-page SEO element and usually target keywords present in title type helps return relevant pages on search engines.

Title Tag Google Example


Advice: Title Tag Should be 55-65 characters including spaces.

2. Description Tag

The description tag should include the most important keywords within 156 characters including spaces.

The description tag is important for your site visitors as they are the summary of the page content that they see on search results. The keywords in meta description used to help websites rank in the earlier days, but not much anymore because of manipulation of this element for SEO, in the past.

Meta Description Tag Example


Advice: Ensure each page has a unique description.

3. Heading Tags

Unlike title and description, The heading tag is visible on the web page to the human visitors. It is also important from search engine point of view as search engine bots acquire the information about the page from the heading tag, especially h1 tag.

H1 tags are meant for the Headline and therefore, your Title should be wrapped around this tag. However don’t over optimize your page by adding keywords to sub-headings which are H2, H3, and H4.

The purpose of H tags is to tell Google how the content is structured for readability. E.g. Our title describes the topic of this post, followed by sub-headings which further explains and goes into detail about On-Page SEO.

heading tag


Advice: Place your targeted keyword in the h1 tag.

4. Write High Quality Content

The page content is what makes it worthy of a search engine organic result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. As such, it is important to create good content. And All the on-page optimization in the world won’t help you if no one finds your content useful.

The content of a page must contain keywords chosen for a particular page. These could be targeted keywords or long tail keywords or synonyms. Just make sure the keyword density is not too high, which means use them only when they make sense to the human reader.

5. SEO-Friendly URLs

Keep the URLs clean and fill them with keywords or words that aptly describe the content. The URLs say a lot about a site’s architecture and often is considered important for SEO as well as usability.

URL structure is important because it helps the search engines to understand relative importance and adds a helpful relevancy metric to the given page. It is also helpful from an anchor text perspective because people are more likely to link with the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL.

6. Optimize Images

When you see a picture of a baby crying, you instantly recognize what’s going on in the picture.

The problem is, this instant recognition isn’t possible for search engine spiders at this time. Instead, you must help the spiders understand each of your images with HTML alternative text attribute called alt tags.

What is image alt text?

The short answer is, it’s the text that the search engine uses to understand images.

7. Content Length

Page content length gives search engines ample text to crawl and plenty of keywords and context clues to help them understand what the article is about. For your written posts, 1,500+ words should be the minimum.

Advice: Improve content to match/better content on competitor websites.

8. Internal Linking

Internal Linking help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. For instance, if you've written about a topic that's mentioned in your blog post on another blog post, ebook, or web page, you should link to that page. That will not only help retain visitors on your website, but also demonstrate the other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines. It

  • helps readers find what they’re looking for 
  • helps your audience get to know, like, and trust you 
  • helps search engines crawl every page on your site 
  • helps search engines create an accurate sitemap

9. Site Map:

Every site must have a sitemap. However, even if sites don’t have one, they get indexed by search engines. The presence of a sitemap makes it a tad easier to find and index pages, for the search engines.

Every site should have an HTML sitemap, and every page should link to that sitemap, probably in the footer for your website user.

10. Text Navigation:

Verify there is text navigation, not JavaScript or Flash navigation that spiders can’t see. Make sure you at least have text navigation on the bottom of the page if there aren’t any spiderable navigation links in the top nav.

Website Navigation

11. Robots.txt:

It’s important this file exists, even if it’s empty. The Robots.txt file tells the search engine spiders what not to index. Also make sure the file doesn’t accidentally exclude important files, directories or the entire site (this has been known to happen!).

Advice: If you have your robots.txt file, Check it with Google Webmaster Tool Robots.txt Tester. The robots.txt Tester tool shows you whether your robots.txt file blocks Google web crawlers from specific URLs on your site.

12. Loading Speed:

Google has stated on the record that page loading speed is an important SEO ranking signal. You can boost your site speed by using a CDN, compressing images, and switching to faster hosting.

Make sure it doesn’t take more than 4 seconds for your page to load: MunchWeb found that 75% of users wouldn’t re-visit a site that took longer than 4 seconds to load.

gtmetrix results


Advice: Check Google PageSpeed Insights or use tools like Gmetrix.com to analyze and improve a website’s performance.

13. Use of MultiMedia:

Visuals are a great addition to any Page. The use of multimedia enhances the search engine positioning of a site and add visuals. Engaging images, videos and diagrams can reduce bounce rate and increase time on site: two critical user interaction ranking factors.

14. Use Social Sharing:

You need social media share and like icons on your webpage, especially if you generate content at regular intervals in the form of blogs or press releases.

Although, Social signals not play a direct role in ranking your site. But social shares generate more eyeballs on your content. And the more eyeballs you get, the more likely someone is to link. So don’t be shy about placing social sharing buttons prominently on your site.

Social Sharing

15. Outbound Links:

Outbound links have a small role to play on search ranking and they are totally under your control. This is an easy, white hat SEO strategy to get more traffic. Outbound links to related pages is a relevancy signal that helps Google figure out your page’s topic. It also shows Google that your page is a hub of quality info.

16. Fix Mobile Usability Issues:

Google is invested in providing users a great mobile experience. See how your site is performing on mobile devices with the Mobile Usability Report, located within Search Traffic section of Google Webmaster Tools. This report lets you know if your touch elements are too close, if your content is sized to the viewport, your flash usage, font size and more.

If you want to check your website mobile usability issue , you can use Google’s mobile friendly test tool.

Fix Usability Issue


Advice: Learn How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues.

17. Use Structured Data Markup:

Giving search engines as much information as possible about your site and the information it offers can only enhance your performance, so it’s become key for pages that want to outrank their competition to use structured data markup (also known as rich snippets) to enhance their search engine listings.

Structured data can have a multitude of benefits, ranging from improved CTR in the SERPs to better SEO performance overall. Here’s what you need to know about adding structured data markup to your site.

Tools for Adding Structured Data:



What is your On Page SEO Strategy? Let us know in comments how much time and expertise you provide to on page SEO of your site.


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