On-page SEO for WordPress: three blanks worth filling first

On-page SEO has a reputation for being a dark art, full of tricks and moving targets. Most of it is not. The on-page work that actually moves the needle is closer to housekeeping: filling in the blanks WordPress left empty, on pages you forgot you published. It is unglamorous, it is finite, and most sites have skipped a surprising amount of it.

There are three blanks worth filling first, because they are the ones a site accumulates without noticing and the ones a search engine notices immediately. None of them is a ranking trick. They are table stakes, the baseline a page needs before any cleverness matters at all.

Meta descriptions: the free pitch you are not writing

A meta description is the short summary that appears under your page's title in search results. It is not a direct ranking factor, but it is the closest thing you get to a free advertisement: it is the sentence that decides whether someone clicks your result or the one below it. Leave it blank and the search engine writes one for you, usually by grabbing whatever text it finds first, which is rarely the pitch you would have made.

WordPress does not add meta descriptions on its own, so unless you have written them, most of your pages do not have one. RecapWP flags a missing description in its Frontend Auditor (a Pro capability) as you browse the page, so you catch it on the exact page that needs it rather than guessing which of your hundred posts need attention.

Alt text: the words your images are missing

Alt text is the written description attached to an image. Its first job is accessibility: it is what a screen reader speaks aloud, and what shows when an image fails to load. Its second job is SEO: it is how a search engine understands what an image actually shows. Most images on most WordPress sites have neither, because the upload flow does not require it and it is the easiest field in the world to skip.

The Frontend Auditor flags images that are missing alt text on the page you are viewing, so you can add it where it matters. Writing it is on you, and it should be: good alt text describes the specific image, and only a human looking at it can do that well.

None of these is a ranking trick. They are table stakes, the baseline a page needs before any cleverness matters at all.

Thin content: pages that say too little

A thin page is one with almost no real content: a stub you meant to expand, an old archive with a single entry, a placeholder that went live and never grew. On their own they are harmless. In volume they tell a search engine that the site is unfinished, and they dilute the pages that are actually good.

The Frontend Auditor flags a page that falls below a real content threshold as you browse it, so you can decide what each one deserves: expand it into something worth reading, merge it into a stronger page, or retire it. The point is not to pad every page to a word count. It is to find the stubs you forgot about and deal with them on purpose.

Why none of these get written for you

You will notice a pattern: RecapWP finds all three of these and writes none of them. That is deliberate. A meta description, a piece of alt text, a paragraph of real content, these are editorial. A tool that auto-generated them would hand you generic, forgettable filler, and generic filler is worse than an honest blank. The value the Frontend Auditor adds here is not the writing. It is the catch: the exact page and image that need a human, surfaced in context while you are looking right at it.

It is also worth saying plainly: doing these well does not guarantee a ranking. Nothing does. What they do is remove the basic reasons a page underperforms, so the quality of your work is what gets judged, not the blanks you left around it.

Work the list, do not chase tricks

The reason to treat on-page SEO as housekeeping is that housekeeping is repeatable. New posts ship without descriptions, new images go up without alt text, stubs get published with good intentions. The way to keep on top of it is the same as everything else in site health: review pages as you publish and revisit them, let the Frontend Auditor flag the blanks in context, and clear them while the list is short.

It is not exciting work, but it is the work that is actually in your control. The fastest way to see how many blanks your own site is carrying is to open the Frontend Auditor on a few pages and look.