Pillar
On-page and content SEO
Where your main term belongs, what titles and descriptions are actually for, and the one rule that beats every other rule here — clarity wins over keyword placement, every time.
These placement conventions are long-standing practice with visible effects. No platform publishes a placement spec, and none of these are ranking factors in any documented sense.
This is where the folklore lives. Exact word counts. Keyword density percentages. A target number of headings.
Almost none of it is documented by anybody. Most of it is superstition built out of correlations somebody spotted in a small sample. What survives a hard look is a short list of sensible habits and one rule that governs all of them.
Where should the primary keyword go on a page?
In the title, somewhere in the first hundred words, in at least one subheading, and naturally through the body wherever it actually belongs. That's the whole convention — and it's a convention, not a documented rule.
None of it justifies a sentence that reads badly. If putting the term in wrecks the sentence, the sentence wins. A page people bounce off doesn't get a consolation prize for having the word in the right spot.
Why those four places
Each one says what the page is about, from a different angle. The title is the page's own claim about itself. The opening is where a reader checks they're in the right place. A subheading says this section genuinely covers the thing instead of mentioning it. And body usage is just what happens when you actually write about something.
Notice that a page genuinely about its subject hits all four without trying. That's the point. The convention describes what honest writing already looks like. It only turns harmful when somebody treats it as a checklist to satisfy on a page that isn't really about the thing.
Clarity wins
Every time. Worth saying flatly, because the alternative has a long history of producing pages that technically complied and were worthless.
These systems model meaning now. The trade that once made awkward phrasing worth it doesn't exist anymore. A clearly written page using the words people actually use will match the searches it should. A stuffed one matches them too — and then loses the reader the second they land.
What's in this section
Titles and descriptions, heading structure, internal linking, covering what someone actually wanted instead of a term, and formatting that people can read.
One theme runs through all of it: nearly every rule here has a readable version and a mechanical version, and the readable one performs at least as well. That isn't luck. It's what happens after two decades of these systems getting better at guessing what a human would find useful.
Keyword placement
The most superstition-heavy topic in the field. Here's the small amount that holds up, and the large amount that doesn't.
Headings & structure
Most people pick heading levels by how big they render. They're a document outline, and the difference shows up for exactly the readers you care about.
Internal linking
Isolated pages chasing isolated keywords lost their value slowly and then all at once. What replaced them is depth, and the mechanism is your internal links.
Titles & descriptions
These are the only part of your page most people will ever see. A decade of advice about character counts has crowded out the one question that matters.
Depth & intent
Depth is not length. It is whether somebody who arrived with a question can leave without needing another page — and intent is the thing most content gets wrong before a word is written.
Readability & formatting
Readability tools count syllables and sentence lengths and hand you a grade level. Writing to that number produces prose that scores well and reads badly.