On-page SEO has a reputation for being fiddly. In practice, a short checklist run consistently beats a long checklist run occasionally. These nine checks take about two minutes on a finished draft and cover the errors we see most often.

The two-minute nine

  1. Title matches search intent. Would someone typing your target phrase feel your title answers it? If your keyword is "how to", your title should teach, not sell.
  2. Title under 60 characters. Longer titles get truncated in results, and truncated titles get fewer clicks.
  3. Meta description under 155 characters with the keyword once. It's ad copy for the click, not a summary for a robot.
  4. One H1, logical H2s. Each H2 should be a subtopic someone might search on its own. If two H2s say the same thing, merge them.
  5. Keyword in the first 100 words. Naturally — as the subject of a sentence, not an incantation.
  6. Short paragraphs. Three sentences is a good ceiling on the web. Walls of text lose mobile readers in seconds.
  7. Two or three internal links. Link to your related posts with descriptive anchor text, not "click here".
  8. One authoritative external link. Citing a real source signals research and helps readers verify claims.
  9. Alt text on every image. Describe what the image shows; it's an accessibility feature first and an SEO signal second.

What to deliberately skip

Keyword density targets, exact-match anchor ratios, and word-count minimums are folklore at this point. Search engines reward posts that satisfy the query. A 900-word post that fully answers a question beats a padded 2,500-word post every time it matters.

Making it automatic

The reason we build title, meta, and heading structure directly into every generated draft is simple: checks one through five stop being checks when they're defaults. That leaves you the human ones — facts, experience, links — which no tool should do for you anyway.

Consistency beats intensity. Nine quick checks on every post outperform an exhaustive audit on one post a quarter.