On-Page SEO in 2016: The 8 Principles for Success

On-page SEO is no longer a simple matter of checking things off a list. There's more complexity to this process in 2016 than ever before, and the idea of "optimization" both includes and builds upon traditional page elements. MOZ has written an amazing article that walks us through what we should be focussing on for effective search engine optimization.

https://moz.com/blog/on-page-seo-8-principles-whiteboard-friday

What changed since 2016

These principles held up better than most SEO advice from the same era, because they were about intent rather than tactics. Keyword density was already dead. Answering the question the searcher actually had was already the job.

What changed is who reads the page. On-page work in 2016 was written for a crawler ranking ten blue links. Today a meaningful share of searches end in an AI-generated answer, and the page that gets cited is the one with clear structure, a direct answer near the top, and enough surrounding context to be quotable.

The underlying principle survived intact. Write the page for the person asking, then make the structure obvious enough that a machine can find the answer inside it. The tactics have a shelf life. That part doesn't.