Anyone who wants their website to be on the top search results of Google and other search engines for the long term should pay attention to a few important things while optimizing their website. If you follow the Search Engine quality on-page and off-page guidelines and optimize your website properly, you will be rewarded with better rankings on SERPs. On the other hand, Google doesn’t like over-optimized websites and pages and punishes websites by pushing them down the search result rankings, which can be very daunting to recover from.
Instead of going on with the optimization haphazardly, you should review and utilize the following basics of on-page optimization of your website.
On-page Search engine optimization (SEO): Checklist for 2025
Get rid of duplicate content.
A website is considered to have duplicate or near-duplicate content when two or more different pages on the website have the same or nearly the same content. Duplicate content is a poison for good ranking and very often leads to your website getting devalued or filtered out in the search engines. Even if you have used unique content on your website, duplicate content problems can arise from a few technical aspects of how your web host handles the domain. The most common cause for duplicate content is if the site is accessible with and without www. This leads to search engines detecting two web pages for your homepage. This can be resolved by making certain redirect changes in the .htaccess file in your hosting panel.
Follow these steps to resolve the issue: Enter the following lines in the .htaccess file (replace “domain” with your site’s name; replace “html” with “php” if relevant):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php
RewriteRule ^index.php$ / [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
After that, log in to your Google Webmaster account and click on Settings and change the preference for the type of domain “with” or “without” “www.”
Amend missing or duplicate meta tags (title, meta descriptions).
Each page should have its own unique title. The title describes the topic of the website, and it should be less than 55 characters. Web pages with missing titles or duplicate titles don’t rank well on search engines, as they can’t decide what the page is about. To check if your website has duplicate titles, log in to your Google Webmaster Tools and click on “HTML Improvements,” go to “Duplicate Meta Page,” and there you can find if your website has any duplicate or missing title tags. Resolve it by creating unique and relevant title tags on your website and submit a new sitemap.
Find and amend pages with thin content
A major focus of on-page Search engine optimization lies in creating and publishing meaningful and relevant content on the website. High-quality content always wins on the search engines and has become the most important factor for better placement of the website on search engines. The content of your page should be unique, relevant, and interesting; it should provide some value to the website users. Improve page usability by adding interactive content like images, infographics, or videos to the web pages. Further, remove junk code from your website to improve the code-to-text ratio.
Find and remove any hidden content
One of the most important principles in Search engine optimization is that you should not utilize any shoddy tricks to improve your Search engine ranking. Hidden content is one of them. Hidden content is content specifically created for Google Bots to artificially manipulate the ranking of the webpage. This content is not visible to users. Using this trick will lead to punishment from Search engines sooner or later. One popular trick is using drop-down elements whose text content is parsed by search engines based on the source code and is available to users only when they click on an active element. Further, hiding content by using the same color background is also considered hidden content. Never use white content with a white background.
Optimize Images with Alt Tags, and Title
Alternative tags for images are the keyword phrases that visitors see in case the image doesn’t load. These tags tell Search engines what the image is about and improve the ranking in the organic and image search results. Webmasters should put in relevant terms and other information with the ALT and Title tags for images.
Rectify bad keyword usage,
Keywords are the lifeblood of any search engine optimization. That’s why proper keyword research is a prerequisite before starting any SEO campaign. One should select the keywords carefully and make sure that they fit the theme of the website or the service you offer. Placing the keywords in dominant positions like paragraph headers improves their value. Further, HTML tags like bold, underline, and italics also improve their importance in the eyes of search engines. There has been a myth about keyword density going on for years. However, as confirmed by Matt Cutts, there is no base keyword density. The density depends on the quality of the article; if you have written quality content, the keyword density will be right. Overusing or underusing keywords for search engines might result in negative results. Instead of focusing on keyword density, content writers should focus on user-friendly, informative content for the website.
Format the content with Headings and subheadings
Headings provide useful information to search engines on the topic of a particular paragraph. Webmasters should create headers carefully and use proper keywords to indicate what the paragraph or section of the website is about. There are special HTML tags to denote headers (H1, H2, H3…), webmasters should use the tags according to the importance of the content on the webpage. The most important paragraphs should be tagged with H1, and it should be placed on top of all other headers.
Use cannonical urls
Setting up canonical URLs specifies the unique URL to the content of your website. It’s primarily used to avoid duplicate content on your website by telling search engines about the preferred or representative URL of the webpage. A website can be accessed with or without www, so with a canonical URL, you set up the representative URL for your website. Google Webmaster Tools has a whole section on canonical URLs and their use and how to specify them. For more details, visit: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Neglecting proper management of webpages
Just putting a website on the internet and then not properly managing and updating it on a regular basis is grossly negligent and can lead to a drop in rankings on search engines. You must renew your webpages with interesting and up-to-date content regularly and maintain the technical aspects and structure of the page. Make sure there are no duplicate titles or meta descriptions, and clean up broken links and create a good-quality 404 error page and 301 redirects. Regularly not managing the website will increase clutter and errors and decrease the quality of your website.
Internal link management:
Create a uniform internal link structure and make sure to link to all pages. Google decides on the importance of a page on a website based on the internal links coming to the webpage and the level of pages linking to it. Make sure to link pages that are directly related to each other, as it will help search engines decide the relevance of the content. Don’t link to irrelevant pages.
A high number of outbound, do-follow, or no-follow links:
When acquiring or earning external links or backlinks, make sure they are as relevant to your website niche as possible. Backlinks from untrusted and non-relevant websites can detain the link authority of your website. You should get both do-follow and no-follow links. Getting only do-follow links creates an unnatural link profile and leads to a Google penalty.
Slow website load time:
No one likes a slow webpage, and the same is true for search engines also. Usually, if a page doesn’t load within 1-2 seconds, visitors just click back and look for another website; that’s why Google considers it one of the search engine ranking factors. Usually, unnecessary scripts, unclean code, and uncompressed images and JavaScript lead to slow page load time. If possible, create webpages using gzip compression or mod_deflate, if your hosting supports these compression methods. To check if your website has slow load time, use Google PageSpeed Insights; it gives you a very detailed analysis of your website loading speed and how you can improve its loading time.
Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Upload sitemap.xml
XML sitemaps help Google and other major search engines understand the structure of your website and index all the pages correctly. Without a sitemap, it may happen that some pages are not found by the search engines or new pages are indexed very late – so it’s advisable to provide an automated sitemap.xml in your website root directory. In general, the map is automatically recognized by the search engines and taken into account. You can also submit it to the Webmaster accounts of Google and Bing.
Using robots.txt
Robots.txt behaves similarly to the sitemap – it is not necessary if you are using index and noindex tags on your HTML webpages. However, if not, you should add robots.txt to tell search engines which pages on your website should not be indexed. For example, the admin area, or links to the cart, and other payment pages. Once you have created the robots.txt file, you should upload it to the root directory of your website and should only include the pages you don’t want to be indexed by search engines.
I hope this post helped you with an overview of the most common mistakes in on-page SEO optimization. In the future, we will discuss in detail all the problems mentioned in this post. The next post will discuss the most common mistakes and basics of off-page SEO and link building.