On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

For those new to on-page SEO, we highly recommend reading our On-Page Ranking Factors. On-page SEO has changed over the years, so it's important to keep up with the latest practices. Below are the latest post about on-page SEO from the Moz Blog, and we have chosen our favorite resources to help you along your journey.

On-Page SEO : The Beginner's Guide to SEO: Everything you need to get started to optimize your pages.

On-Site SEO Learning Center : Our free on-site SEO learning hub. Here, we’ve gathered our top resources in one place.

More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO : On-page SEO starts with keywords, but Google uses tons of advanced methods to determine content relevance.

Illustrated Guide to Advanced On-Page Topic Targeting for SEO : A simple framework for on-page topic targeting that produces satisfying content and makes optimizing easy.

On-Page SEO for 2019 - Whiteboard Friday : No matter the year, this advice from SEO expert Britney Muller will help you to rank.

Most Recent Articles on On-page SEO

32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011
Lindsay Wassell

32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011

On-page SEO

With all the excitement and planning that comes along with a New Year, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with newfangled ideas. You probably have a long list of SEO tactics in the pipeline for 2011. Finding the resources, whether time or money, is the real trick. The point of this post is to minimize your to-do list by covering 32 SEO tactics that you shouldn't focus on. If any of these buggers have made it onto your 2011 task list or are still lingering in the queue from years past, go ahead and cross 'em off.

Rel Canonical: Impact on Analytics
M

Rel Canonical: Impact on Analytics

On-page SEO

There is one topic that relates to the canonical tag that no one is talking about yet. It's impact on Google Analytics. I'm a numbers guy by nature. I check various stats in Analytics every day. I'm always looking for new ways to look at the numbers and new ways to figure out what they're telling me. Yes, they talk to me on occasion.

301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?
Paddy Moogan

301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?

On-page SEO

There has been quite a lot of discussion lately about the use of rel=canonical and we've certainly seen a decent amount of Q&A from SEOmoz members on the subject. Dr. Pete of course blogged about his rel-canonical experiment which had somewhat interesting results and Lindsay wrote a great guide to rel=canonical. Additionally, there seem to be a few common problems that are along the following lines

Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training

Moz Academy Training

Complete courses to master SEO basics

Start Learning

Keyword Research Master Guide

Learn Keyword Research like the pros

Read the guide

Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis

Win rankings and traffic from your competition

Read the guide
Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not)
Lindsay Wassell

Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not)

On-page SEO

There are a lot of great posts and resources about the rel canonical tag, but they can be hard to identify with a simple search. Even if you break through the clutter and find something truly useful, the current information can be hard to separate from the old. The web has been missing a current top-to-bottom resource on the rel canonical tag. In this post, I’ll do my best to cover it all...

How to Optimize PDF Documents for Search
Alex Fusman

How to Optimize PDF Documents for Search

On-page SEO

PDF documents are often neglected in on-site SEO efforts. I consider that a mistake, as there is actually a large amount of potential in optimizing PDFs. The documents often contain good, unique, high-quality content that can be useful for search visitors. We know that search engines have gotten pretty good at crawling and indexing PDFs, and I personally see them in search results often. So it'...

Serious Robots.txt Misuse & High Impact Solutions
Lindsay Wassell

Serious Robots.txt Misuse & High Impact Solutions

On-page SEO

Some of the Internet's most important pages from many of the most linked-to domains, are blocked by a robots.txt file. Does your website misuse the robots.txt file, too? Find out how search engines really treat robots.txt blocked files, entertain yourself with a few seriously flawed live examples, and learn how to avoid the same mistakes yourself.

The Effectiveness of Good Meta Titles
Joshua Unseth

The Effectiveness of Good Meta Titles

On-page SEO

If you've ever taken a look at SEOmoz's list of Search Engine Ranking factors you'll see the things that SEOs always talk about as being important - links, anchor text of external links, where links come from, on-page keywords and keyword usage in the title tag. There's no disputing that thes...

International CRO - Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps
S

International CRO - Choosing the Wrong Colors and Other Mishaps

On-page SEO

Good morning Mozzers! Today we're going to walk you through some rather basic but far-too-oft overlooked conversion factors specifically for international SEO. Anyone who has had the pleasure of using ecommerce sites in multiple countries may have noticed that as a general rule the sites look pretty similar if not identical. Today we are going to walk you through some of the pros and con...

PageRank Sculpting and a New Way to Hide Links from GoogleBot's Eyes
Cezary Lech

PageRank Sculpting and a New Way to Hide Links from GoogleBot's Eyes

On-page SEO

Most of you probably remember the article about changes in PageRank algorithm connected to rel=nofollow attribute and Rand's new ideas about PageRank Sculpting. Today I want to show you a new mechanism that is a bit better at controling the flow of PageRank within our pages than rel=nofollow and other well known methods. In This post I will show You how to remove links from GoogleBot Eyes.

Coding Semantic Pages With HTML5 That Still Look Good on Old Browsers
S

Coding Semantic Pages With HTML5 That Still Look Good on Old Browsers

On-page SEO

While the number of links you get to your website and the popularity it will receive do not depend only on you, the on-page optimization is in your hands and nowadays you MUST squeeze out everything you can from it. This is why I start each new website by creating its backbone (call it framework, template or whatever you prefer). In this post I will try to use all the benefits HT...

Why You Manage CTR, Bounce Rate and Conversion Rates
J

Why You Manage CTR, Bounce Rate and Conversion Rates

On-page SEO

Rand's Whiteboard Friday a few week ago, got me quite worked up. He states that, on the basis of some black hat friends' experiments, user behaviour, especially click through rate (CTR), is not important to Google. First off, I'll concede that I don't think Google uses CTR, or Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate as measurements. I'm pretty sure that Google uses some other numbers that they can coll...