The Ultimate On-Page SEO Checklist For 2025 + Cheat Sheet

Instead, we created a guide that covered everything about that topic. We could have published a generic piece of content like “25 Tips for Video SEO” and covered every tip already on the SERP. Staying on top of what’s working right now is your best chance at creating content people actually want to consume. And those links show Google that our content is well-referenced and trustworthy.

An astonishing fact is that 15% of daily Google searches have never been searched before. This means that every day, your business gets new opportunities to be the first to reach a prospective audience. However, you will never know how to do it without proper keyword research. It may be a good idea to opt for SEO outsourcing services if you want to get the desired results faster and avoid common mistakes. Depending on your team’s possibilities, you may shift only a part of your tasks or the implementation of the whole strategy to remote experts. If you’re considering this option, check out our SEO pricing guide to calculate the expenses of the most efficient services for your website.

It’s also imperative for users with screen readers because it improves the image’s readability. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing factors directly on your website. Those factors, such as H1-H6 header tags, title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, etc., are easier to control and maintain. On-page SEO improves the quality of your web pages so that search engines can understand them and rank them higher in search results.

Crawling: How search engines discover content

When you match search intent and optimize for search engines (more on that soon), you’ll get posts that rank higher and that are also useful for readers. When readers stay longer on your web pages and share your content on social media or with peers, it signals to search engines that your content is high-quality. Just like with title tags, they are not one of the most significant on page ranking factors by themselves. However, a good meta description will help convince users to click on your page in the results (aka improve CTR). On-page SEO, or on-site SEO, is optimizing web pages for users and search engines. It refers to specific elements and attributes of a website, such as content (written words), HTML, system, CSS, internal links, outbound links, and more.

📝 63. External Linking

It differs from off-page SEO strategies that occur outside the webpage – most notably in the form of building inbound links. The two types of SEO are equally important and an effective SEO strategy has to include both. Off-page SEO refers to all your efforts in acquiring external resources that help you rank higher in search engines and gain domain authority. The most popular example of off-page SEO is link building, which involves getting other websites to link back to your website.

That’s why Google takes load times into account when ranking pages in search results, and why we include page speed optimization with our on-page SEO services. When it comes to on-page SEO, keywords play a critical role in improving your online visibility. On-page SEO (also called on-site SEO) is the practice of optimizing webpages to rank higher on search engines. It includes optimizations to visible content and the HTML source code. If you want to improve your search engine rankings in 2025, you need to get backlinks. On-page SEO is a term that covers numerous strategies applied on a web page to improve its ranking within search engine results.

But in most cases, the closer your keyword is to the front of your title tag, the better. On-page SEO is important because search engines rely on keywords and other on-page SEO elements to determine whether a page matches a user’s search intent. Our list of Google ranking factors is a great example of link bait.

The page meta description is shown on the search engine results page (SERPS). It has to be descriptive, up to 200 characters, SEO Anomaly and unique for each page. No need to include your domain in the title – There is no need to include your domain name in the title because this is added automatically by Google.

The URL of a page, which is also known as a slug, is a permanent link. An optimized URL should be less than 255 characters, and hyphens ‘-‘should be used to separate the different parts of the URL. Furthermore, it should be short, descriptive, and include your target keywords. Yes, on-page SEO is crucial for improving search engine rankings and driving organic traffic. Clear policies, secure website protocols (HTTPS), and accurate information build trust with users and search engines alike. User engagement metrics are indirect signals that search engines use to determine the quality and relevance of a webpage.

• In our case study, they were the only tool to detect AI content with near 100% accuracy – even for the most advanced model.
• Make sure all pages are linked correctly in your header and footer navigation too.
• Google recommends adding links to authoritative external sources to provide value.
• Learn how in Shopify’s guide to creating and managing URL redirects.
• If your URL is not indexed, check out our guide to Google indexing to understand why, and to learn how you might be able to get it indexed.
• Our approach targets users first because that’s what search engines reward.

The analysis allows you to discover the pages that don’t perform well and find efficient ways to improve them. When looking at this URL, you know the page’s context and what to expect from it. So, as you can see, optimizing your URL is fundamental to helping search engines and users understand the relevancy of your page. However, search engines have advanced far enough to understand how to rank pages based on how users engage with the content. By creating content, you’ll help your business improve your on-page SEO.