Academy
Cluster 04 / 08
On-Page SEO
The eight elements every page needs to rank — title tags, meta descriptions, headers, internal links, URLs, image alt text, anchor text, and the formatting that wins featured snippets and AI Overview citations.
On-page SEO is the work that happens on the page itself — the elements you control directly, that Google and AI engines parse to decide what the page is about and whether it deserves to rank. Get the eight basics right and the page becomes a viable candidate for any query it targets. Get them wrong and no amount of off-page authority will save it.
This is the On-Page SEO cluster — eight articles covering the elements every page must ship correctly: title tags, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, internal linking, URL structure, image SEO, anchor text, and the formatting that earns featured snippets and AI Overview citations.
The compounding rule: on-page is cheap to fix and expensive to ignore. A title tag rewrite takes minutes; the wrong title tag costs you a year of organic traffic. Read these in order if you're doing a full on-page audit, or jump to the chapter that matches the gap in your current pages.
Articles in this cluster
Read in order, or jump to the chapter you need. Each article ends with a link to the next one.
01Chapter 01 of 08Title tags
The title tag is still the single highest-leverage on-page element you control. Here is how to write one that earns the click in Google and gets cited by AI engines without sounding like a 2014 SEO.
9 min readRead chapter
02Chapter 02 of 08Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions do not rank, but they decide whether the people who see your snippet click through. Here is how to write the second-most-important 160 characters on your page.
8 min readRead chapter
03Chapter 03 of 08Header hierarchy
Headers are the table of contents your page hands to Google, AI engines, and screen readers. Skip a level or fake a hierarchy and all three get the page wrong.
8 min readRead chapter
04Chapter 04 of 08Internal linking
Internal links are the cheapest ranking lever you control. They distribute authority, define topical clusters, and tell AI engines which pages on your site own which topic.
9 min readRead chapter
05Chapter 05 of 08URL structure
URLs are a small ranking signal and a large UX signal. The slug you set today decides whether you can refactor the site cleanly in two years or whether every change becomes a redirect minefield.
8 min readRead chapter
06Chapter 06 of 08Image SEO
Images are half the page weight on most sites and one of the most under-optimised on-page elements. The fix is mechanical: descriptive filenames, modern formats, real alt text, and lazy loading.
9 min readRead chapter
07Chapter 07 of 08Anchor text
Anchor text is the visible label of a link, the second-strongest signal of what the destination page is about, and the place where most teams either over-optimise or skip the lever entirely.
8 min readRead chapter
08Chapter 08 of 08Snippet optimization
Featured snippets, paragraph answers, list answers, and AI Overview citations all share the same shape: ask the question, answer it cleanly, and give the engine a passage it can lift verbatim.
9 min readRead chapter