The Building Blocks of Search Visibility
A building doesn’t stand by accident. Before anyone pours concrete, the drawings specify load, span and tolerance. Richard Stone, founder of technical PR agency Stone Junction, argues that on-page SEO works in exactly the same way.
Most people who walk into a finished structure never think about the decisions that went into the building’s design. The decisions that made it possible were invisible, made long before anyone arrived.
Every week, companies in engineering and manufacturing invest real money in content that search engines largely ignore. The writing might be strong and the argument sound, but the page sits quietly on page four, occasionally found by accident, generating very little traffic. The problem is rarely the words, it is the structure that supports them.
On-page SEO is a discipline most marketing teams know about in theory but apply inconsistently in practice. But good practice applied consistently will deliver results.
Where most search engines actually look
The title tag is the first signal. It should contain your primary search term and your supporting terms, and it is perfectly acceptable to separate them with vertical slashes. Search engines read it as a summary of what the page covers. So does the person who sees it in results before they decide whether to click.
The H1 heading follows the same logic. At minimum it should contain your primary keyword. If the phrase sounds natural with the supporting terms included, put them in. A heading that reads naturally for a human reader will almost always serve a search engine well. The H2 subheadings throughout the page carry similar weight, and they offer the chance to include terms that may not fit comfortably in the H1.
Body text should contain each target keyword roughly three times across the page. Google’s own guidance makes the underlying logic plain: “to return relevant results, we first need to establish what you’re looking for — the intent behind your query.” A page that mentions its subject only once or twice is probably not covering it with enough depth to satisfy either a search engine or a reader.
To return relevant results, we first need to establish what you're looking for — the intent behind your query.
The elements most people miss
ALT attributes on images are, in practice, the most overlooked part of on-page SEO. They exist to describe images to people who cannot see them, and search engines use them for the same purpose. Try to use as many of your keywords in the ALT attributes as possible, while still sounding like a human writing aa sentence that genuinely describes what the image shows. Search engines read left to right and prioritise early words, so lead with the most important term.
This applies to images most people forget as well, not just the obvious ones you add in the body text. The logo in the top corner of the page could have an ALT attribute and page furniture like social media icons could have them. For a well-optimised page, no image should sit on the site without a sentence that earns its place.
Bold and italic formatting carry weight as well. Having each target keyword appear in bold at least once, and in italics at least once, signals to a search engine which terms the page considers important. The condition is that the formatting should make sense to a human. Bold text draws a reader’s eye;if there’s nothing there worth emphasising, leave it plain.
Links and the structure underneath them
Link tooltips are a small detail that most content teams never consider. In standard HTML, a title attribute on a link creates a tooltip that appears when someone hovers over it. Search engines read this text. It takes seconds to add and contributes to the overall signal density of the page.
Outbound links to credible external sources are also important. A page that references research, data or expert opinion and links to those sources, signals to search engines that the content is properly researched. Aim for two or three outbound links to relevant, authoritative destinations per thousand words. The same logic applies to quotes: a well-sourced page that draws on external voices reads as more credible, to a human and to an algorithm.
The question of length
Page length is one of the more useful variables to optimise, and one of the harder ones to guess at. Tools such as SEMRush will estimate the word count of the pages currently ranking for a given search term, and that figure provides a reasonable baseline. Writing significantly fewer words than the recommended length tends to cost a page ranking position, where writing significantly more doesn’t reliably gain one. The goal is to cover the topic completely, not to pad out the wordcount.
Good SEO is good GEO.
Optimising image size
Page load speed is a ranking factor, and images are the most common cause of slow pages. A reasonable ceiling for any single image is between 50 and 60 kilobytes. In practice, images should be as small as they can be while remaining sharp enough to serve their purpose. An uncompressed photograph sitting at several hundred kilobytes is depressing the page’s performance every time someone loads it.
These are not decisions that anyone will celebrate in a strategy meeting, and they are not the kind of work that surfaces in a case study. They are the load-bearing walls of a well-built page, and most visitors will never notice them. Danny Sullivan, Google’s former search liaison and director within Google Search, put it plainly: “Good SEO is good GEO.” Most people who walk into the finished structure never think about the drawings. They just experience the result.
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