On-page SEO covers the elements of individual web pages that help search engines understand them and help searchers choose them: titles, descriptions, content, URLs, images and links. Google advises that content should be created primarily for people rather than to manipulate search rankings.[1]
Titles
Google generates the clickable title link for each result automatically. Besides the HTML <title> element, it may draw on the page's main visible title, headings, Open Graph tags, other prominent text, the anchor text of links to the page and website structured data.[2] Google recommends a descriptive, concise and unique title on every page, without keyword stuffing or repeated boilerplate, and notes that long titles may be truncated.[2]
Meta descriptions and snippets
The text snippet under a search result is generated automatically, mostly from the page's content, and can change depending on the query. Google may use a page's meta description when it describes the page more accurately than the visible content, and advises against identical descriptions across many pages or descriptions that are just lists of keywords.[3] Google does not use the keywords meta tag; it stopped using it because of widespread keyword stuffing.[4][5]
Content and E-E-A-T
Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether content is created primarily for people and demonstrates first-hand experience and expertise.[1] Its search quality rater guidelines use the concept of E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, of which trust is considered most important. Google says E-E-A-T is not itself a specific ranking factor and that raters' assessments are not used directly in ranking.[1] "Experience" was added to the earlier E-A-T concept in December 2022.[6]
The Starter Guide states that the order of headings does not matter to Google Search, that there is no ideal number of headings, and that no particular word count helps a page rank.[5]
URLs
Google recommends readable words rather than long ID numbers in URLs, hyphens rather than underscores between words, and as few parameters as possible.[7] Keywords in a domain name or URL have little effect on ranking beyond appearing in breadcrumbs.[5]
Images
Google calls alt text the most important attribute for image metadata and recommends descriptive alt text written in context, without keyword stuffing, along with short descriptive filenames and placing images near related text. When an image is used as a link, its alt text serves as the link's anchor text.[8]
Internal links
Google uses links to discover pages and understand their relevance, and generally crawls only standard <a> elements with an href attribute. Every important page should be linked from at least one other page on the site, using descriptive, concise anchor text rather than phrases like "click here."[9]
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is not a violation of Google's spam policies, but it can waste crawling resources; Google recommends consolidating duplicates with a redirect or a rel="canonical" link and will choose a canonical page itself if none is specified.[5][10]
References
- ^ ^ ^ "Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content". Google Search Central, updated October 5, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ ^ "Influencing title links in Google Search". Google Search Central, updated December 10, 2025. developers.google.com
- ^ "Control your snippets in search results". Google Search Central, updated April 20, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ Cutts, Matt (September 21, 2009). "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking". Google Search Central Blog. developers.google.com
- ^ ^ ^ ^ "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide". Google Search Central, updated December 10, 2025. developers.google.com
- ^ "Our latest update to the quality rater guidelines: E-A-T gets an extra E for Experience". Google Search Central Blog, December 15, 2022. developers.google.com
- ^ "URL structure best practices for Google Search". Google Search Central, updated October 21, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ "Image SEO best practices". Google Search Central, updated March 2, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ "Link best practices for Google". Google Search Central, updated December 10, 2025. developers.google.com
- ^ "How to specify a canonical with rel="canonical" and other methods". Google Search Central, updated July 10, 2026. developers.google.com