On-page rules
Titles, descriptions, headings, URLs, links and images. The signals that tell an engine what a page is about and which query it answers.
Reviewed Oct 30, 2026 · next review Nov 2, 2026
Impact split
- High impact 2
- Medium impact 2
- Low impact 2
Engines covered
Rules in this area that apply to each engine
- Google 6 of 6
- Bing 6 of 6
- ChatGPT 2 of 6
- Perplexity 2 of 6
- Gemini 1 of 6
- Claude 2 of 6
High impact 2
Write a unique, descriptive <title> per page with the brand at the start or end
Google builds title links mainly from the title element, but also uses the visible H1, og:title, anchor text and WebSite structured data, and it rewrites titles that are vague, stuffed or boilerplate.
Link to every indexable page with crawlable <a href> links and descriptive anchor text
Google generally only follows <a> elements with an href, and links built on javascript: URLs or click handlers may not be extracted.
Medium impact 2
Organize pages with one clear H1 and descriptive H2/H3 sections that match real questions
Google's 2026 AI guide recommends clear paragraphs, sections and headings for readers, and lists headings as a title link source.
Use <img> elements with descriptive alt text and filenames; Google doesn't index CSS images
Google calls alt text the most important image attribute and discovers images through the src of <img> elements, including inside <picture>.
Low impact 2
Write a meta description that accurately summarizes the page; expect Google to rewrite it
Google primarily builds snippets from page content and uses the meta description only when it describes the page more accurately for the query.
Use short, readable URLs with words separated by hyphens
Google's URL structure guidance recommends descriptive words and hyphens to separate them, and it clarified the hyphen versus underscore guidance in October 2026.
No longer works 1
Stop filling in the meta keywords tag
Do insteadRemove meta keywords from templates