A Beginners Guide to Complete On-page SEO Checklist for 2024
Tired of struggling hard to get noticed on search result pages? Putting so much time & effort but still not seeing any positive outcome? You are not alone here. If you want to rank your webpage higher on Google, then you should not miss the chance to apply this on-page SEO checklist in your SEO journey!
On-page SEO is the procedure of individual page optimization for getting better search rankings on search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. On-page SEO activities cover various tasks such as title tag optimization, Schema markup, making keyword-rich meta descriptions & more!
I am going to highlight 20+ on-page SEO checklists that are important to get higher rankings in this blog post. Explore these on-page SEO factors today, which can lead you to remarkable SEO success.
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Table of Contents
What is On-page SEO Checklist?
On-page Checklist or On-site SEO checklist is a set of practices that is essential in web page optimization for better search engine ranking & user experience. This is the founding stone of webpage optimization to get desired SEO success. It helps Google to get an idea about the main content of your page & let it appear on search results for wider audience reach in search engines.
On-page SEO is applicable to both the search engines & for the users. Some major on-page SEO practices cover title tag optimization, meta description optimization, URL optimization, quality content creation, schema markup, adding internal & external links & other ranking elements.
Why On-page SEO Checklist is Important?
On-page SEO is the pillar activity for enhanced organic traffic & higher search engine rankings, especially when you know what advantage it brings to you.
Enhanced Search Engine Rankings: The better your on-page SEO is, the higher rankings you get in search engines. It’s that simple! Higher search rankings will bring you more potential traffic to your webpage. All these can be possible just by making highly engaging, fresh & quality content.
Better User Experience: On-page SEO checklist often boosts the site structure, comprehension, readability & entire user experience of a webpage. This leads to a higher audience engagement rate with lower bounce rates as the content is of higher quality & easy to understand.
Boosted CTR: With optimized title tags & meta descriptions, the rate of clickability increased. This leads to capturing more audiences & boosts the CTR. Writing a catchy & compelling meta description is responsible for increasing click-through rates.
Higher Organic Traffic: Proper following of the On-page SEO checklist leads you to get higher search rankings & more online visibility. This, in turn, helps you to get higher organic traffic.
Competitive Advantage: Accurate on-page SEO can offer you higher competitive benefits. If you optimize your content perfectly, which your competitors are not doing, then you will stay ahead of the ranking competition.
More Optimized Media & Images: On-page SEO checklist includes image & media optimization to boost your user experience & generate more organic traffic from search results.
Mobile-friendliness: Mobile friendliness is another major benefit of proper on-page optimization. Proper website optimization for mobile devices can boost search rankings and help you to reach a wider audience.
More leads & sales: Through accurate on-page SEO practice, you can generate the right type of traffic, which can result in increased leads & sales.
Enhanced Crawl Rate: This is the amount of requests made by Googlebot to your website per second when they are crawling the site. A good on-page SEO can lead to an improved crawl rate with reduced issues.
Brand Visibility: Creating optimized content as an on-page SEO technique for your webiste helps it become more visible to search results. This higher visibility helps you to add more brand value & brand reputation.
20+ On-page SEO Checklist for SEO Success
Take a complete look at each practice digital marketers should use to get higher ranking & domain authority on the SERPs in 2024. You must follow the below-mentioned optimization steps or on-page SEO checklist for a perfect SEO journey each time.
Research & Find Target Keywords
Conducting thorough keyword research & finding the most relevant or target keywords are very important parts of the On-page SEO checklist. The major aim is to rank higher on target keywords & make online presence more prominent in search engine result pages.
Some key factors you should keep in mind while performing keyword research are checking the intent, volume & keyword difficulty rate in popular keyword research tools like SEMRUSH, Ahrefs & Google Keyword Planner tool. You can find the best-performing focus keywords by conducting detailed keyword research & getting to know more about search intents. This helps you to optimize your webpages hassle-freely.
Add Focus Keyword in the URL
Another vital aspect of on-page SEO optimization is URL slug optimization, and each URL should be unique. The URLs should be clear, simple & descriptive. It should contain the focus keyword to become different & unique from others.
Try to avoid adding any number in the URL. As most of the CMSs can auto-generate URLs for webpage, hence it can be problematic to get better searches. So it would help if you edited your URL as per the On-page SEO checklist.
For example, “A Beginners Guide to Complete On-page SEO Checklist” is optimized for the target keyword “On-page SEO Checklist”. So this keyword has been used in the URL of this blog post.
Title Tag Optimization
Google sees title tags as another major ranking factor that needs to be optimized well. Title tags are the most vital thing in on-page SEO & they offer search engines a detailed idea of your page. Always try to place the focus keyword at the beginning of your title tag. It will be proven beneficial for both the search engines & users.
Through this, your content can reach users just by hitting your target keywords in their search queries. Title tags are the best way to clear the purpose of each webpage to Google & let users have an idea of what page they are hitting.
Add Keyword-Rich Meta Description
Adding keyword-rich meta descriptions is always considered the best on-page SEO optimization practice. Keyword-rich descriptive meta tags are very major to Google as you use them in Snippets for your webpages & get you a higher search engine ranking.
It does not affect the page rankings directly but performs as a part of an on-page SEO checklist to capture more clicks on SERPs.
Google always suggests you write your own snippet with click-worthy & highly engaging meta descriptions with target keywords in it for better organic CTR & higher SEO scores. The things you should always keep in mind are to be very concise with your meta descriptions, make unique descriptions, be value-focused & maintain content clarity.
Add the Headline in H1 tag
The heading with the target keyword should always be added to the H1 tag to make your webpage highly visible to visitors. You should always place the target keyword at the beginning of your H1 tag to improve your overall SEO score.
This tag helps the crawlers to crawl your keyword-added title on Google. When you missed to place the keyword inside the H1 tag, your title can be overlooked by crawlers by Google. You should also make your headline very concise & clear for better SEO outcomes.
Add Focus Keywords in the Body Content
According to Google, context & keywords are vital factors to know the relevancy of a keyword to a webpage. If you miss mentioning the target or focus keyword inside your body content, then Google might think your page a irrelevant to that specific keyword.
Natural usage of target keywords is considered the best practice among the on-page SEO checklist. Accurate keyword placement is very important in SEO. Always place your primary keyword inside the first paragraph of your body content during on-page optimization. But don’t do keyword stuffing, as it is considered a negative factor for ranking.
Use the Focus Keyword in the First 150 Words Once
For better SEO results & rankings, try to place the target keyword naturally in the beginning section of the body content. This should be placed within the first 150 words to witness stunning results.
This specific keyword placement signals to Google or other search engines like Bing or Yahoo about the relevancy & importance of that target keyword. You will also get a quick engagement rate with this.
Add Internal Links
Another major fact of the on-page SEO checklist is adding internal links inside the content of your webpage. These are the relevant links that connect the pages of your website. This is known as the method of hyperlinking other relevant pages to your website for better navigation.
This helps users in navigating your website, causing a higher SEO score. It is responsible for distributing the page authority & keeping highly engaging audiences for longer periods of time.
Internal links navigate readers to other pages of your website and keep those visitors on your site for longer. The longer the visitor’s time, the longer the time Googlebot needs to crawl and index your web pages. The main purpose is to offer Google detailed information about the site to get higher search rankings.
Add External Links
According to Google, citing well-informed resources are extremely helpful for website visitors. Try to add links to highly reputed & reliable external sources. This external linking is considered a major ranking factor during on-page SEO. These external links include credibility & reliability to your webpage, offering an extra trust factor to readers.
Always try to add outbound links of 5 to 7 authority sites on your webpage. These links help Google to think that your webpage & the content in it is well-referenced & reliable.
Optimize Images with alt-text
Image optimization is a major ranking factor; even Google says so. This can get you higher organic traffic. You must change the filenames and replace them with the focus keyword. Then, you include the alt-text for images using the same target keyword. This will be helpful for crawlers to get an idea of what your image contains.
Another major thing is to compress your images for faster loading time. You should use various plugins such as Shortpixel, Optimole, or reSmush to compress your images.
Create User-Experience Focused & High-quality Content
You must make sure that your content is highly engaging as well as relevant to your target audience. Use relevant images or videos to improve site understanding. Avoid making thin or duplicate content to lower to site’s value.
The recommended word length of SEO-friendly content should be between 2100 to 2400 words and not less than 1500 words. You should offer accurate information within your content & cite data statistics by linking to external sources that are highly relevant. The content should meet the criteria of SERPs to keep target users highly engaged.
URL Length
The length of the URL is a very importance factor of an on-page SEO checklist. Always try to keep the URL as short as possible & make it easy to comprehend by both the search engines & audiences.
A clear & short keyword-reach URL structure is highly recommended to achieve SEO success. The reason for this is the inclusion of clarity on the webpage. It needs a very short timespan to thoroughly crawl your sitemap. Along with this, these short URLs are easy to remember, resulting in a better user experience. Always keep one thing in mind to make URLs under 60 characters if possible & optimize them for easy sharing.
Add Subheadings in H2 Tags
After adding your heading to the H1 tag, place your subheading under the H2 tag and complete your headlines with an on-page SEO checklist. These H2 tags help you organize your web content for that specific keyword, leading to better user experience & higher search rankings.
A survey report has highlighted the fact that the top 29% of high-performing posts or articles use keyword-rich H2 tags. The subheadings make the article very convenient for user understanding by dividing the whole article into small logical parts. Subheadings allow Google to get a brief idea of the content structure of a web page. It is considered ideal to use 3 to 4 H2 tags as per the depth of the content.
Subheadings encourage readers or potential viewers to stay longer on the web page. You should be very clear with your focus keywords & add them inside the H2 tags to get a higher reach & better user experience.
Appy Schema Markup
Schema Markup is a major SEO tool that you should not miss to mention while discussing the on-page SEO checklist factors. Schema Markup or structured data is a unique piece of code that highlights the necessary information about your site to the search engine crawling bots that are visiting your website.
It allows search engines to have a clear understanding of your high-quality content. Schema Markuup is the structured data that offers extra data on your website for Google’s understanding. It helps your page to rank precisely on search engine results pages impacting the ranking factor such as Google’s rich snippets.
It boosts search engine results quality with information-rich snippets. Google assists 30+ types of schema markups, and they include Events, Products, articles, and more! This schema markup application is a time-consuming & tricky process, but Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can help in adding the schema to the web page.
E.E.A.T Signals
Another major factor of the on-page SEO checklist you should not forget is E.E.A.T. This stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness in SEO & you can not miss this new search quality rater guidelines of Google. These are considered vital in on-page SEO.
These factors signal the level of your content’s credibility & reliability. You can not directly measure or track EEAT signals. It is not directly linked to the ranking factors, but it affects the performance of the latest algorithms & ranking factors. EEAT is ensuring your future online presence.
The quality of your site can be easily evaluated with the help of these EEAT signals. All you can do is to site reliable & well-referenced sites to improve your EEAT signals, which in turn help you to secure a better ranking in SERPs.
Grammar, Spelling & AI-Checking
A good readable content is very important for better SEO results. Therefore, you must put importance on spelling, AI-checking & good grammar as the essential factors of an on-page SEO checklist. The user experience is boosted as a result of better readability on web content.
The more errors you make in your content, the more unprofessional it looks, increasing the chances of a bad user experience. This bad user experience results in higher bounce rates.
You can take the help of some grammar & spelling checker tools such as Grammarly & Quillbot and increase the readability of your content. You can also consider some AI-detector tools to check the AI percentage in content. An easy-to-understand content leads to higher audience engagement by conveying the author’s message clearly. Always proofread your content & make necessary corrections to increase the readability & get a higher SEO score.
Check Page Indexing
If you want to see your page on the top of the search results, you must request Google’s Crawlers to crawl your webpage & include it in the page indexing list. Through the Google Search Console platform, you will be able to see whether your page is indexed or not.
First, you need to inspect the existence of your page in Google Search Console’s page indexing list. If not, then they show “URL is not on Google,” then you request for indexing, and after some time, your page will be indexed successfully.
You can also check the page crawlability report using Semrush’s site audit tool. Regularly check crawling errors and fix the issues as needed. Ensure that your pages are not set to the “noindex” feature. Indexing is the first & foremost step to making your webpage appear in search results. Therefore, it is considered a major factor in influencing overall SEO success.
Keyword Density
Keyword density is another vital factor in an on-page SEO checklist & you should not miss to check that for SEO success. It is the appearance rate of keywords after each 100 words. The rate of keyword density changes depending on the total number of words in the content.
One major thing you must keep in mind is to keep your keyword density at least 1% of the total words of your content. Try to place 1 to 2 keywords after 150 words of your content to maintain this advisable keyword density.
Do not try to stuff keywords unnaturally to maintain this golden percentage. Overuse of keywords can lead you to higher search engine penalties. You can check your keyword density with tools like SEO Review Tools, Yoast SEO tools & more!
You must add the keywords in the H1, H2, H3 & throughout the entire content. All you need to do is maintain the balance of your keywords to get SEO success.
Include High-resolution Visual Elements
You must add high-resolution & relevant visual elements content to make it more attractive to audiences & boost the overall audience engagement rate. This, in turn, increases the SEO score and is viewed as a major element of the on-page SEO checklist.
High-quality images, infographics & videos help in increasing the user experience with the web content. These make your content more visually appealing and keep your audiences stay longer in your site longer. This also reduces the bounce rate of your website & helps in SEO. Your website’s reliability & credibility can also be increased with these high-resolution visual elements.
You should make sure that all these visual elements, such as videos, images, or infographics, are well-optimized & reduce the loading time & speed of your website. Add alt text to these elements. This makes your content understandable for search engines like Google. Always remember that images talk louder than words.
Mobile Responsive Designs
Mobile responsiveness is another crucial factor of an on-page SEO checklist. If your page is not properly optimized for mobile devices, there is a chance you might be struggling to rank higher on SERPs.
According to the reports of Google, the majority of searches come from smartphones. An amount of 60% of search volumes are made on mobile devices. Half of the users restrict those pages that took at least more than 3 seconds to open or load.
Therefore, it is very vital to make a responsive design with an optimized mobile speed which is 55 to 85 out of 100. You must track the performance of your page on mobile devices regularly as this is considered a major ranking factor on SERPs.
Search engines like Google are now on a “Mobile First Index,” and it highlights the fact that not properly optimized mobile pages do not rank on search engines.
Check Page Speed
Page speed has been a very important ranking factor in SEO since 2010 and you can not miss this one when you are reading about the complete on-page SEO checklist. Potential users & Google want any pages to load quickly. The slight loading delay can lead to a poor user experience just by closing your page and going to the pages that are relevant to your page with faster loading speed.
All you can do is to keep some factors in mind while increasing the page speed is to check redirect chains, large HTMLs on the page, large CSS files or JavaScripts. Try to use Page Speed Insights to track the speed of your web page and see which areas you have poor scores. You can check the core web vitals report using the SEMrush site auditing tool to check the LCP, CLS & FID, which influence the page speed.
Robots.txt
The Robots.txt file is a vital factor for better SEO results. This controls crawlers to crawl on visiting all web pages of your site, like the Contact Us page & some private pages. It guides search engines to the pages which should be indexed and which should be ignored. If you want to boost your SEO score, you must accurately configure your robots.txt.
The crawlability of your site can be enhanced with a well-configured robots.txt file, which is responsible for better site/ page indexing. This also leads to higher search results ranking.
Robots.txt restricts the indexing of duplicate or thin pages & irrelevant pages as well. It also allows Google to put more importance on relevant pages. You should be careful about the robots.txt set up. You can test the robots.txt file with Google’s Tester tool.
Social Sharing
You can enhance the online visibility of your blog posts or articles with the help of social sharing. This is a contributing factor to SEO success, and one should not ignore social sharing as a major factor of an on-page SEO checklist.
These foster visitors to promote your content on various social media platforms. This boosts the reach and presence of your web content. The more your content is shared on social media, the higher the traffic to your webpage. This leads to higher search rankings, increasing the SEO score of the whole website.
Have you added the social sharing buttons already? If not, then add them immediately on accurate positions on your web page. Make your content easily shared on social media and boost the rate of user engagement. Always try to add some visually appealing buttons as social sharing buttons to get more clicks & shares.
Now, track the social shares & continue visitor engagement to see the visible SEO results.
HTTPS Security
HTTPS is also known as a vital ranking factor & helps you to secure a better SEO score. The HTTS means a secure site. The lock icon before the HTTPS address denotes that the site is secured for your browsing. Search engines like Google don’t want to harm user experience by referring an unsecured web address to people, leading to an unsafe website.
If there is an unsafe website with an HTTP web address, then they must own an SSL certificate. Secured websites offer you the facility of data encryption, which means your digital data are in safe hands, and no data leakage or hacking will happen.
All you can do is redirect the HTTP pages to HTTPS pages, find the mixed content issues & fix those as per requirement.
Use LSI Keywords
Using LSI keywords in content will offer you an accurate context of the topic or other related topics that are highly relevant to your content. Are you confused about whether LSI keywords are still in demand? You should put variations of LSI keywords all over the content to make it more relevant and naturally generated.
These LSI keyword variations are also working as a major factor in increasing your website traffic. This also drives you to get higher SEO success. LSI keywords are the vital terms that go well with your focus keyword.
You can use LSIGraph.com to find our LSI keywords and add some of them to your web page to increase the overall traffic and SEO score.
Mobile Pop-ups
Search engines, especially Google, have been very careful about Mobile pop-ups for the past few years. You should be very careful about Google’s Pop-up guidelines & rules if you want to secure your website’s higher rankings without causing any harm.
The golden rule of mobile pop-ups is to use them in very short banners so that readers are not being interrupted while going through your content. If then are unable to read to content fully & get distracted by the pop-ups, and have to close your pop-up to read, then this is counted as a poor user experience. This can result in reduced SEO scores and negatively impact the search engine rankings.
Wrapping Up,
You have already read the major factors of the on-page SEO checklist, which is more than just a helpful factor for robust search engine optimization. Using these on-page SEO practices is vital for websites to get higher traffic, site visibility & search results rankings.
Suppose you have limited time to optimize your website. In that case, you must focus on these on-page SEO factors, including adding keywords in the title tag, H1, meta description, and H2, making high-quality content, keyword density, short URL, keyword-rich URL slug, & more!
When you are modifying your web content for your website, you must prepare a list of the best on-page SEO checklists for your instant search engine optimization needs.