SEO · SEO & preview
last updated 2026-10-05 · built by edy appenzeller · open source
Published 2026-10-05
On-page SEO has 12 things that matter. Everything else is either outdated or noise. This post walks through each one and what good looks like.
TL;DR
Title, meta, OG tags, robots, sitemap, JSON-LD. Skip the 200-item checklists. Here is what moves the needle for organic search.
The four essentials
A unique, descriptive
tag (50–60 characters). A unique <meta name="description"> that summarizes the page (140–160 characters). A <link rel="canonical"> that points to the canonical URL. A single <h1> per page that matches the topic. If you get these right and skip everything else, you will still rank for most queries.</p>
<h2>The four that help with social shares</h2>
<p>Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url) control how your link looks when shared on Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord. Twitter Card tags (twitter:card, twitter:image) override for Twitter specifically. A og:image of 1200×630 with text readable at thumbnail size works best. JSON-LD structured data (Article, Product, FAQPage, etc.) can produce rich snippets in Google.</p>
<h2>The technical four</h2>
<p>A robots.txt that disallows crawlers from junk (search results pages, internal search, admin pages). An XML sitemap that lists every public URL. Structured data (JSON-LD) that matches the page content (Article for blog posts, Product for product pages, FAQPage for Q&A). Mobile-friendly responsive design with readable font sizes and tap targets.</p>
<h2>What does not matter anymore</h2>
<p>Keyword stuffing (penalized since 2011). Meta keywords tag (I added this in 2009, it has not been a ranking factor since). Excessive internal linking (a few contextual links per page is enough). Long-form content for its own sake (a 3000-word post that does not answer the question is worse than a 600-word post that does).</p>
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