On-page SEO is the part you fully control, which makes it the part worth getting right before anything else. It is also the area with the most outdated advice in circulation, so this covers what still matters and flags what no longer does.

The title tag

The <title> element remains the single most valuable piece of on-page text. It is what appears as the clickable headline in search results and what fills the browser tab.

The common advice is a character limit, usually "55 to 60 characters". That is a rough proxy for the real constraint, which is pixel width: Google truncates at roughly 600 pixels on desktop, so a title full of narrow letters fits more than one full of capitals and wide characters.

More useful than counting characters: put the distinguishing words first, because truncation happens at the end. "Vintage Brass Door Handles | Shop Name" survives truncation better than "Shop Name - Browse Our Range of Vintage Brass Door Handles".

One thing worth knowing: Google rewrites titles in search results a substantial share of the time, usually when it judges yours to be keyword-stuffed, duplicated across pages, or a poor match for the query. A rewritten title is a signal your original was weak.

Headings

Use one <h1> per page describing what the page is about, then <h2> and <h3> to structure the content underneath in a sensible hierarchy. Do not skip levels for visual reasons; if an h2 is too large, change the CSS rather than the tag.

The reason this matters is not primarily ranking. It is that screen readers navigate by heading structure, and a page with headings chosen for font size is genuinely difficult to use without sight.

URLs

Short, readable, lowercase, hyphen-separated, describing the page. /blue-ceramic-planters rather than /index.php?cat=7&id=2294.

The important rule is about changing them: do not change a URL that is already ranking unless you have to, and if you must, set up a 301 redirect from the old address. Changed URLs without redirects are one of the most common ways small sites lose traffic they had already earned.

Internal links

This is the most underused tool available to a small site, because it costs nothing and you control all of it.

Link between your own pages using descriptive anchor text. Not "click here" or "read more", but the actual subject: "how we test stream reliability". This tells search engines what the target page is about, and it tells visitors what they will get.

Pages with no internal links pointing at them are effectively orphans. If a page is not linked from anywhere on your site, it is telling search engines you do not consider it important.

Images

Every meaningful image needs alt text describing what it shows. Decorative images that carry no information should have an empty alt attribute (alt="") so screen readers skip them, which is a real distinction rather than a technicality.

Alt text is for describing the image. It is not a place to list keywords, and stuffing it is both an accessibility failure and a spam signal.

Content structure

Answer the question the page exists to answer near the top. A lot of small-site content buries the answer under three paragraphs of introduction, which loses both readers and the featured-snippet opportunity.

Beyond that: short paragraphs, real subheadings, lists where the content is genuinely a list. This is readability advice rather than SEO advice, but the two have converged to the point where the distinction rarely matters.

What no longer matters

Several things that still appear in guides are dead. The meta keywords tag has been ignored by Google since 2009. Keyword density is not a thing any modern search engine calculates; writing to hit a percentage produces worse text and no benefit. Exact-match repetition of a phrase throughout a page is counterproductive. And word count has no threshold: the "1,500 words minimum" advice is a misreading of a correlation. Thorough pages tend to be longer, but padding a short answer does not make it thorough.