Edip Kilinc is the founder of Webwavers. Together with his team, he develops websites, brands, and digital presences for ambitious companies – with over 250 completed projects and accolades including the German Design Award 2026.
On-page SEO includes everything that happens on your own website: content, structure, technology, linking. It is to be distinguished from off-page SEO, i.e. everything that happens outside – especially links from other websites.
The difference is practically relevant: On-page is completely under your control. You don't need to convince anyone, no cooperation, no budget for links. What you change today is online tomorrow.
That is precisely why it is worth getting your on-page clean first. Anyone who builds links while their own pages are unstructured is pouring water into a leaking barrel.
Factor 1: The Title
The title is the headline that appears in the search results. It is both a ranking factor and the text used to decide whether someone clicks.
Three rules: under 60 characters so it doesn't get cut off. The most important word at the front, because the front carries more weight and because people read from left to right. And a separate title for each page – two pages with the same title compete against each other.
The most common mistake in companies is an automatically generated title following the pattern "Page Name – Company Name". This wastes the most valuable space on the entire page on a term that no one searches for who doesn't already know you.
On-page SEO includes everything that happens on your own website: content, structure, technology, linking. It is to be distinguished from off-page SEO, i.e. everything that happens outside – especially links from other websites.
The difference is practically relevant: On-page is completely under your control. You don't need to convince anyone, no cooperation, no budget for links. What you change today is online tomorrow.
That is precisely why it is worth getting your on-page clean first. Anyone who builds links while their own pages are unstructured is pouring water into a leaking barrel.
Factor 1: The Title
The title is the headline that appears in the search results. It is both a ranking factor and the text used to decide whether someone clicks.
Three rules: under 60 characters so it doesn't get cut off. The most important word at the front, because the front carries more weight and because people read from left to right. And a separate title for each page – two pages with the same title compete against each other.
The most common mistake in companies is an automatically generated title following the pattern "Page Name – Company Name". This wastes the most valuable space on the entire page on a term that no one searches for who doesn't already know you.
Every page needs exactly one H1. It tells search engines and readers what this page is about. It does not have to be identical to the Title – that appears in the search results, while the H1 is on the page.
Below that, H2 and H3 structure the content. This hierarchy is not a mere formality: it is how search engines recognize which subtopics a page covers, and it is how readers decide whether to keep reading.
A common mistake is choosing headings based on appearance rather than meaning – using an H3, for example, because an H2 looks too big. Size belongs in styling, not in markup.
The time of counting text length and keyword density is over. What matters is completeness: does the page answer the question someone came with – and the follow-up questions as well?
A practical test: search for your target term and look at the first five results. Which subtopics appear everywhere? That is the minimum scope. What is missing everywhere? That is your opportunity.
This determines the length – not the other way around. Some questions are answered in 400 words, others need 2,500. Artificially stretching a page helps no one and is nowadays rather harmful.
The most underestimated lever. Internal links do three things at once: they guide readers further, they show search engines which pages belong together, and they distribute authority from strong to weaker pages.
Three rules, that's all it takes: the anchor text describes the destination – "how a relaunch works", not "click here". Every important page gets at least three incoming links from the body text. And pages on the same topic link to each other, instead of standing isolated side by side.
The beauty of it: it costs nothing but attention when writing.
Technology is not a ranking factor in its own right in the narrowest sense, but it determines whether the other three are effective at all. A page that takes four seconds to load on a mobile phone loses visitors before the content is even read.
The three most common causes are always the same: images that are too large, scripts that block rendering, and fonts that are reloaded from external servers. All three can be fixed without rebuilding.
PageSpeed Insights shows you where you stand in two minutes. The value for mobile is what matters, not the one for desktop.
To ensure the list is complete, here are the points that appear on many checklists but barely make a difference today:
Keyword density. No longer a factor, and trying to hit it makes texts worse. Meta keywords. Have been ignored for over fifteen years. Exact word repetitions. Search engines understand synonyms and context. Text length for its own sake. See above.
Anyone who leaves these four out and takes the five above seriously is ahead of most competitors.
