Most on-page SEO advice is a decade out of date. These eight things still move the needle, and they take an afternoon.
On-page SEO has a long tail of advice that stopped being true years ago. Keyword density, exact-match headings, stuffing the meta keywords tag — none of it matters now. What follows is the short list that still does.
1. One clear subject per page
A page that tries to cover three topics ranks for none of them. If you find yourself writing "and also", that is usually a second article.
2. A title that reads like a result
Write the title tag as the line you would want to click in a search result. Aim for roughly 50–60 characters so it is not cut off, put the distinctive words first, and do not repeat your site name — the engine adds it.
3. A meta description that sells the click
It is not a ranking factor, but it is the sentence that decides whether anyone clicks. Around 150–160 characters, written as a promise about what the reader will get.
4. Headings that form an outline
One h1 per page, then h2 for each major section and h3 beneath it. Read your headings on their own: if they summarise the article, the structure is right.
5. Real internal links
Link to your other articles where a reader would genuinely want them, using descriptive anchor text. This is the single most under-used on-page lever, and it costs nothing.
6. Images with alt text and sensible files
Describe the image for someone who cannot see it. Compress it. Lazy-load it. A 4 MB hero image undoes a lot of other work.
7. Structured data
Article, breadcrumb and author markup tell search engines what the page is rather than making them guess — and increasingly, they are what AI answer engines quote. Flexy Blogs outputs all of it automatically.
8. Speed, honestly measured
Test on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not on your laptop on fibre. That is the experience most of your readers are having.
A quick checklist
| Check | Target |
|---|---|
| Title tag | 50–60 characters, distinctive words first |
| Meta description | 150–160 characters, written as a promise |
| H1 | Exactly one |
| Internal links | At least two or three per article |
| Images | Alt text on every one, compressed |
| Canonical | Set, and pointing at itself |
Do these eight, then go and write the next article. That is where the remaining gains are.
Point five is the one I keep forgetting. Went back through forty old articles and added internal links; traffic to the older ones roughly doubled.
Tom Fletcher
17 Sep 2026 at 5:26 pm