On-page SEO is everything on the page itself that helps a search engine understand what it is about, and helps a human decide to click. This page covers each element, what it actually influences, and — just as usefully — what it does not.

You can check most of these on any URL with Sitecheck's meta title and description checker and H1 and heading checker.

Title tags and meta descriptions

The title tag is the clickable headline in search results and one of the stronger on-page relevance signals. The meta description is the summary underneath it.

The single most misunderstood point: the meta description is not a ranking factor. Google has said so repeatedly. It is a click-through factor, which is a different and still valuable thing — a compelling description earns clicks from a position you already hold.

Google also rewrites descriptions frequently — studies consistently find it happening on the majority of queries — when it judges another snippet better matches the search. That is not a failure on your part; a well-written description still sets the baseline and is used verbatim often enough to matter.

Titles: aim for roughly 50–60 characters. Google truncates on pixel width, not character count, so capital letters and wide characters shorten the usable length.
Descriptions: roughly 150–160 characters. Front-load the substance in case of truncation.
Write one per page. Duplicate descriptions across a site are a wasted opportunity and a common audit finding.
Match search intent and include the query naturally — matched terms are bolded in the SERP, which draws the eye.
An empty description lets Google pull arbitrary page text, which is usually worse than anything you would write.

The meta title and description checker measures both in rendered pixels rather than characters, and previews the exact snippet Google would show on desktop and mobile.

Heading structure

Headings (h1–h6) describe the outline of a page. They serve search engines, but they serve screen reader users more directly: heading navigation is one of the primary ways assistive technology users move through a page, which makes heading structure an accessibility requirement as much as an SEO one.

One h1 per page, describing the page as a whole.
Do not skip levels. h2 → h4 breaks the outline for assistive technology.
Use headings for structure, never for visual size. Style with CSS.
Do not wrap logos or decorative text in headings — a surprising number of templates make the site logo the h1 on every page.

Our H1 and heading checker renders the full h1–h6 outline for a URL and flags missing or duplicated H1s and skipped levels.

Keywords

Keywords are the terms people actually type. Modern search engines match on meaning rather than exact strings, so the job is covering a topic properly, not hitting a density target.

Keyword density as a tactic is dead — and keyword stuffing is an explicit spam violation. What still works:

Research what people genuinely search, including the long tail, and write for the intent behind it.
Use the primary term naturally in the title, h1, and early body copy.
Cover related concepts and questions. Semantic coverage beats repetition.
Match intent type: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional queries want different pages. Ranking a product page for an informational query is a losing fight.
One primary topic per page. Two pages targeting the same intent compete with each other.

Structured data

Structured data is machine-readable markup — JSON-LD is Google's recommended format — that describes what a page is about: an article, a product, an FAQ, an organisation, a person.

It does not directly improve ranking. What it does is make a page eligible for rich results: review stars, FAQ dropdowns, breadcrumbs, product pricing. Those change how much space you occupy in the SERP and how many people click.

Use JSON-LD in a <script type="application/ld+json"> block.
Only mark up what is genuinely visible on the page. Marking up content that is not there is a policy violation and a common cause of manual actions.
Never fabricate reviews or ratings. Invented aggregateRating markup is one of the most frequently penalised structured-data abuses, and the penalty applies site-wide.
Validate with Google's Rich Results Test and keep an eye on the Search Console enhancement reports.
Link entities with @id so a person or organisation is declared once and referenced, rather than redefined on every page.

Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type) control how a URL renders when shared on social platforms and in messaging apps. X/Twitter reads its own twitter: tags and falls back to Open Graph.

These have no effect on search ranking. They exist entirely to control the preview, which affects whether a shared link gets clicked.

og:image at 1200×630 is the safe size across platforms.
Use absolute URLs for images — relative paths silently fail on most platforms.
Set og:url to the canonical URL so shares consolidate.
Check the result with Sitecheck's Open Graph checker before you publish; platforms cache aggressively and a bad first fetch can persist.

E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is the framework Google's human quality raters use to evaluate a page and the people behind it. The extra "E" for Experience was added in December 2022 to reward first-hand knowledge over purely theoretical content.

An important clarification: E-E-A-T is not a score and not a ranking factor you can optimise directly. Quality raters do not change rankings; their judgements train the systems that do. But the signals it describes are real, and they matter most for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) topics — health, finance, legal — where bad information causes real harm.

Weak signals are easy to spot and easy to fix: anonymous authors, no citations, no clear ownership, no contact details.

Publish real author bios with credentials and links to professional profiles.
Cite primary sources, and keep dates and statistics current.
Make ownership obvious: a real About page, real contact details, a named human.
Add Person and Organization structured data so the entity is machine-readable.
Demonstrate first-hand experience. Content that shows the author actually did the thing outperforms content that summarises other summaries.

Backlinks

A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Links remain one of the strongest off-page ranking signals, because they are a hard-to-fake indication that someone found your content worth referencing.

Relevance and authority matter far more than volume. One link from a respected site in your field is worth more than hundreds from unrelated directories.

Earn links with content genuinely worth citing: original research, useful free tools, clear documentation.
Prioritise topical relevance over raw domain metrics.
Do not buy links. Paid link schemes violate Google's spam policies, and the risk is asymmetric — the upside is modest, the downside is a manual action.
Audit your profile periodically. Disavow only genuinely toxic links; the tool is overused and most sites never need it.
Internal links matter too, and you fully control them. They distribute authority and tell search engines which of your pages are important.

Engagement metrics

Bounce rate, time on page, and similar metrics describe visitor behaviour. They are useful diagnostics and not direct ranking factors — a point worth being firm about, because plenty of SEO advice claims otherwise.

Bounce rate is particularly easy to misread. A high bounce rate on a page that fully answers a question in one screen is a success, not a failure. The visitor got what they came for. Judge it against the job the page is meant to do.

What does matter is the underlying reality these metrics hint at: if people arrive and immediately leave unsatisfied, that eventually shows up in signals that do count.

Compare against intent, not a universal benchmark.
Segment by device and traffic source before drawing conclusions.
Investigate sudden changes — they usually mean something broke, not that behaviour shifted.
Note that GA4 reports "engaged sessions" rather than classic bounce rate, so numbers are not comparable to older Universal Analytics reports.

On-page SEO: meta tags, headings, and structured data