What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to everything you can control directly on your web pages to improve their ranking in search results. This includes the content itself, the HTML tags, the URL structure, internal links, images, and page speed.
Unlike off-page SEO (backlinks, brand mentions), on-page SEO is entirely in your hands. Getting it right is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy — no amount of link building will compensate for poorly optimized pages.
✅ Free Tools for This Checklist
📝 1. Title tag
✓Include your primary keyword near the beginning of the title
✓Keep it between 50–60 characters to avoid truncation
✓Include your brand name at the end separated by | or –
✓Make it unique — no two pages should share the same title
✓Add a power word (Free, Best, Guide, How to) to improve CTR
🏷️ 2. Meta description
✓Write a unique description for every page — never duplicate
✓Keep it between 120–160 characters
✓Include your focus keyword — Google bolds it in search results
✓Add a call to action — "Learn", "Try", "Discover", "Get"
🔗 3. URL structure
✓Use short, descriptive URLs with your target keyword
✓Use hyphens to separate words — not underscores or spaces
✓Keep URLs all lowercase
✓Avoid stop words like "a", "the", "and", "of" in URLs
✓Add a canonical tag pointing to the preferred URL version
Advertisement
📄 4. Content and headings
✓Use one H1 tag per page — include your primary keyword
✓Use H2 and H3 tags to structure content with keyword variations
✓Include your keyword in the first 100 words of content
✓Keep keyword density between 1–2% — use our checker
✓Aim for 1,500+ words for competitive topics — longer content ranks better
✓Target Flesch Reading Ease of 60+ — use our readability checker
✓Use synonyms and semantically related terms throughout
🖼️ 5. Images
✓Add descriptive alt text to every image including your keyword where natural
✓Compress images before uploading — use our Image Compressor
✓Use WebP format for smaller file sizes — use our WebP Converter
✓Use descriptive file names — keyword-seo-guide.jpg not IMG_1234.jpg
🔗 6. Internal links
✓Link to 3–5 related pages from each article using keyword-rich anchor text
✓Link to your most important pages from high-traffic pages
✓Avoid generic anchor text like "click here" or "read more"
✓Fix broken internal links — they waste crawl budget and hurt UX
📊 7. Schema markup
✓Add Article schema to blog posts and news articles
✓Add FAQ schema to pages with question-and-answer content
✓Add Product schema to product pages with price and availability
✓Add BreadcrumbList schema to all pages for better navigation display
✓Test schema with Google's Rich Results Test after adding it
⚡ 8. Page speed & Core Web Vitals
✓Aim for 90+ PageSpeed score on both mobile and desktop
✓Compress and convert all images to WebP format
✓Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files
✓Enable browser caching and GZIP/Brotli compression
✓Use a CDN to serve files faster to users worldwide
✓Defer non-critical JavaScript to improve Time to Interactive
📱 9. Mobile optimization
✓Use a responsive design that works on all screen sizes
✓Set the viewport meta tag: width=device-width, initial-scale=1
✓Use font sizes of at least 16px for body text on mobile
✓Make tap targets (buttons, links) at least 48×48px
Start optimizing with free tools
Use our 42+ free SEO tools to implement every item on this checklist.
Browse All Free Tools →