On-Page SEO Checklist: What to Check Before You Publish
Publishing a page without checking it first is like sending a letter without reading it back. Small oversights, a missing title tag, a heading that skips a level, a meta description left blank, quietly cost you rankings before the page even gets a fair chance. This checklist covers the essentials to work through on every page before you hit publish. None of it is complicated, but the number of live pages missing at least two of these items is higher than most people would expect.
On this page
- Title tag, write it for the search result, not the page
- Meta description, earn the click, don’t just describe
- Heading structure, one H1, then a clear hierarchy
- Body copy, keyword placement and readability
- Image alt text, descriptive, not decorative
- Internal links, connect the page to the rest of the site
- URL, short, readable, and keyword-led
- Page speed, check before you publish, not after
Title tag, write it for the search result, not the page
Your title tag is what appears as the blue link in Google. It needs the focus keyword, and it needs to sit naturally within roughly 55 to 60 characters. Beyond that length, Google truncates it, and a truncated title looks unfinished.
Avoid vague titles like “About Us” or “Services Page”. Every page should have a title that tells a stranger exactly what they’ll find there. If two pages on your site could share the same title, at least one of them has a problem.
Meta description, earn the click, don’t just describe
A meta description does not directly affect rankings, but it does affect whether someone clicks. Think of it as a two-line pitch. Keep it under 155 characters, include the keyword where it reads naturally, and end on something that gives the reader a reason to choose your result over the one above or below it.
Leaving the meta description blank means Google writes one for you, pulling a random sentence from the page. That random sentence is rarely the right one.
Heading structure, one H1, then a clear hierarchy
Every page gets one H1, and that H1 should contain or closely reflect the focus keyword. Below that, H2s and H3s should create a readable outline, not random formatting choices. A common mistake is using heading tags purely to make text bigger, which breaks the logical structure Google uses to understand the page.
A useful test is to read just the headings in order. If they tell a clear story of what the page covers, the structure is working. If they read like a random list of bold sentences, it needs rethinking. You can also check this during a technical SEO audit to catch heading issues across the whole site at once.
Body copy, keyword placement and readability
The focus keyword should appear in the first paragraph, ideally within the first hundred words. After that, use it naturally a handful of times and let related terms fill in the gaps. Forcing exact-match repetition reads badly and serves no purpose.
Paragraph length matters too. Short blocks are easier to scan. Long, unbroken paragraphs push people away, particularly on mobile. A page that earns a proper ranking tends to be one that’s actually pleasant to read, not just technically complete.
One genuine trade-off worth knowing. Writing purely for keyword frequency often makes copy worse. Readability and ranking are not in competition. They tend to move together.
Image alt text, descriptive, not decorative
Every meaningful image needs an alt attribute that describes what is in the image. This matters for accessibility first, and for image search second. Alt text should be specific. “Plumber fixing a copper pipe joint” beats “plumber” every time.
Decorative images, things that are purely visual, should carry an empty alt attribute rather than a description. Screen readers skip them, which is the correct behaviour.
Internal links, connect the page to the rest of the site
A page with no internal links pointing to it is effectively invisible inside your own site. Before publishing, check that at least one or two existing pages link through to the new one, and that the new page links out to relevant content elsewhere on the site.
In our experience, taking over sites from previous agencies often reveals pages that have sat completely isolated for months. No internal links in, no internal links out, and understandably no traffic.
It is one of those things that is easy to miss when a site is managed by someone not paying close attention to the whole picture.
URL, short, readable, and keyword-led
The URL slug should reflect the page topic in plain English. Drop stop words where they add nothing, avoid dates unless the content is genuinely time-specific, and never leave auto-generated slugs like ?p=287 in place.
- Good:
/on-page-seo-checklist/ - Avoid:
/blog/2024/march/on-page-seo-what-to-check-before-you-publish-a-new-page-on-your-site/
A clean URL is readable in a search result, easy to share, and gives Google a clear signal about the page topic before it has even crawled the content.
Page speed, check before you publish, not after
A page that loads slowly will not rank as well as one that is fast, regardless of how well the on-page elements are set up. Run the page through Google’s PageSpeed Insights before it goes live. Large uncompressed images, render-blocking scripts, and a bloated database are the most common culprits. Fixing them after a page has been indexed is slower work than catching them first.