On-page SEO best practices: what a page must do to be the best answer

A page should target one query intent, and its title tag should state which in the words a searcher would use. The title is written for the results listing, where it competes for a click; the H1 for the reader who has already arrived. They should agree without being identical.

Titles have a character budget. On this site the metadata template appends the brand to every title, so titles are written without it and held to forty-nine raw characters, which keeps the displayed title under sixty and stops it truncating mid-phrase. The common failure runs the other way: the title as a keyword slot, the H1 as a slogan, and neither stating what the page answers.

The first paragraph under a heading — the page's and every section's — should be a complete answer to the question the heading asks: roughly forty to sixty words, standing alone, naming its subject. Detail and caveats come afterwards. A page that builds towards its conclusion reads well and gets selected by nothing.

Our answer-first rewrite playbook describes the pattern as a repair for pages that already rank. Here it is a habit to write in from the start, because retrofitting it means touching every section again. The test is mechanical: delete everything under each heading except its first paragraph and check whether what remains still answers the question. If not, the answer was buried or never there.

A page's heading hierarchy is its outline. One H1 names the subject; each H2 states the question a section answers; H3s appear only where a section subdivides. Read with every paragraph stripped out, the headings alone should tell a reader what the page covers, in what order, and where their answer sits.

Two failures account for most broken outlines: headings chosen for their font size, so a page skips from H2 to H4 because the H3 looked wrong in the theme; and headings used as labels — Overview, Conclusion — which match no query anyone types. A heading phrased as the question, or as the practice, matches what an engine is holding when it compares pages.

Internal links to a page that needs to rank should come from pages on the same site that already carry authority, placed in the body where the subject comes up rather than only in navigation, with anchor text that describes what the destination answers instead of a bare URL or "read more".

List the pages with the most external links and impressions; for each, find the paragraph where the target page's subject already comes up; link that phrase, using the words a reader would use to ask for the destination. The caveat is restraint: a paragraph with five links is a directory, and a footer full of keyword anchors has not worked for a long time.

Depth on a page means resolving the sub-questions someone with the target query brings to it, established by reading what ranks and listening to how buyers ask. Length is a by-product, not a target. A page is long enough when those questions are answered and too long the moment it carries on.

The sub-questions come from three places: what competing pages answer that yours omits, the People Also Ask box, and what buyers put to your sales and support teams. The third is the source most pages ignore. Padding comes from the opposite instinct — an introduction defining a category for a reader who just typed it, or a word count set as a goal.

One page per intent means one URL for each distinct thing a searcher wants, not one for each keyword variant. Where two pages on the same site serve the same intent, both rank worse than one merged page would, because links and engagement split between them. Merge into the stronger URL and redirect the other.

The diagnostic is behavioural: if the URL that ranks for a query keeps changing between two pages, they are competing; if each holds a stable position for different queries, they are not. Our comparison of consolidating against publishing gives the test — coverage, not volume — and the exception: a comparison page and a how-to page look alike, serve different intents, and merged would serve neither.

Images should carry a file name that says what they show and alt text that describes them for a reader who cannot see them. Neither is a place for a keyword list. A screenshot of a settings panel is named after the panel and described as one; a decorative image gets an empty alt attribute.

Alt text written for an engine reads as spam to the person who depends on it. The export pipeline is the usual culprit for file names: a diagram that took an hour to make ships as the design tool named it. Where an image carries part of the argument, caption it with the point, because the caption is read by everyone and the alt text by few.

An FAQ block should answer questions people have actually asked — from sales calls, support tickets and the queries the page already receives — in complete standalone answers of forty to sixty words. Every answer belongs in the HTML, visible or collapsed, and any FAQPage markup must carry exactly the same questions and answers.

Invented FAQs — "Why choose us?" — are marketing wearing a question mark. The subtler fault is in the markup: questions in the JSON-LD absent from the page, or answers that differ between the two. Our own FAQ component puts every answer in the HTML and only toggles visibility, so markup and page agree. If you cannot find a handful of questions people asked, the page does not need an FAQ block.

A page that asserts a result nobody measured — a percentage, a client count, a time to first ranking — is a liability. An assistant summarising it drops the caveat and repeats the figure with your name attached. If the number cannot be reproduced from data you hold, describe the method and leave the number out.

The qualifiers are the first casualty of summarisation. "In one engagement", "typically" and "up to" make the claim defensible; a summary keeps the claim and discards the defence, leaving only the figure, now attributed to you. We removed such figures from our own site rather than relabelling them; where a page needs a number, it is derived from something that can be counted.