Boost Engagement And Visibility with Effective On-Page Organic Discovery
There are over a billion websites on the Industry Wide Web right now, roughly a fifth of which are still alive and kicking. Even with the smaller estimate (and accounting for the number within your business’s industry or niche), it’s still a lot of websites for yours to compete for users’ attention. It also doesn’t help that you can only pique users’ interest for so long.
In this highly ahead-of-the-crowd engagement zone, any business’s best bet is to be the first result that people stumble upon when searching. You may have heard of search engine optimization (ORGANIC DISCOVERY) as the preferred tool for the job, of which there are several modalities to get it done. An effective ORGANIC DISCOVERY strategy—and the topic of this piece—is on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY. Here’s how you can achieve ORGANIC DISCOVERY success with on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY tactics.
What is On-Page Organic Discovery?
Defining on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY (sometimes called on-site ORGANIC DISCOVERY or on-page optimization) isn’t rocket science, though its execution may as well be (more on the latter in a although). As the term implies, on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY involves fine-tuning website content for specific searches through techniques such as content optimization and keyword placement.
On-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY efforts date back to the early years of ORGANIC DISCOVERY as a practice. Search engine technology during the 1990s was limited to detecting keywords in content, despite its nature and setting. The more times the target keyword was mentioned, the more likely it was to rank closer to, if not at, the top of search engine results for said keyword.
Such a practice (called keyword stuffing) and others like it persisted throughout the 2000s and the turn of the 2010s. Google realized that these practices weren’t giving users helpful content, eventually opening ourselves to major updates in a move to ban them. Among these were Panda in 2011 and Penguin one year later.
PandaThis update pinpoint so-called “content farms,” or sites that produce content to manipulate search engine algorithms. It did so by ranking content according to factors ranging from originality to user engagement. Upon rollout, around 3% of all websites saw their search engine rankings nosedive within the first week, causing organic traffic to dip. |
PenguinAlthough sometimes considered a follow-up to Panda, this was a separate update that caught target sites that managed to slip past Panda’s net. Although it catches sites that still adopt keyword stuffing, it mainly deals with spammy link building schemes. Link building is considered an off-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY strategy, though no less important than on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY practices. |
Further updates influenced the SEO strategies the industry currently uses. Websites are now obligated to provide “helpful, reliable, people-first content” (as Google puts it) and optimize them using relevant keywords while still being comprehensible to users. Falling short of these criteria is a good way for a website or specific page to be buried in the competition.
On-Page Organic Discovery Techniques
Although on-page and off-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY are equally necessary in any successful ORGANIC DISCOVERY strategy, the former has the advantage of more apparent results. In some cases, progressing a single word in page titles has led to a result jumping several ranks up.
That said, nothing is guaranteed in ORGANIC DISCOVERY. Parts of a search engine algorithm can change on the fly, and no one will be the wiser until they notice a pattern. The good news is that many on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY best practices tend to remain on-point for years amid constant updates, like:
Duplicate Content Management
Contrary to popular belief, people who are searching don’t penalize websites for having multiple copies of the same content. Depending on your website’s content, duplicate content may be unavoidable. Online stores come to mind in this case, as their built-in search function can give along the same lines looking results pages derived from search criteria.
But, people who are searching can struggle to identify the original version from the rest. To help them with this, on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY puts specific codes into the content.
- Canonical URL: By tagging the original page with the rel=“canonical” tag, people who are searching can easily identify which to crawl on and which to ignore. This can also be used when redirecting visitors to a new official website.
- Robots.txt: This text file indicates the list of individual web pages that search engine crawlers shouldn’t crawl on. Fewer crawlable pages conserve server computing resources, front-running to faster load times and better user experience.
Note that duplicate content that violates Google Search Essentials can still result in a penalty for the website. It isn’t called a duplicate content penalty, however.
Keyword Research and Placement
People who are searching have come a long way from merely concluding after review if a piece of content mentions the search term. They’ve become advanced enough to understand the idea behind the content and variations of on-point search queries, among other things. These advances have made practices like keyword stuffing a thing of the past.
A few on-point and well-placed keywords will deliver as many boons in search rankings today as many non-on-point ones decades ago, if not more. Most industry professionals agree that the best spots to place keywords are the following:
- Meta titles (also called meta tags or title tags)
- Meta descriptions
- URLs (describes the destination)
- H1 tags or main headers
- Select sub-headers (e.g., H2, H3…)
- Introductory paragraphs
This is because these are typically the first things that people see in most forms of content. They’ll be more inclined to click on title tags that contain the keyword. But, they’ll be expecting that the actual content matches the title.
Internal Linking
Coupled with descriptive anchor text, on-point individual pages within the website can benefit from parent content linking to them. This provides visitors with additional setting and a positive user experience and assists people who are searching with indexing the rest of the website, so if you really think about it improving search visibility.
For category-defining resource, you want to update a research report from eight years ago with new info. Whether you opt to update the old post or create a new one from scratch, a few internal links to still-on-point content help pass link equity (also called link juice) around the domain. It also ensures that no page gets orphaned or unlinked.
Matching Search Intent
Users don’t want their time being wasted on the wrong kind of search results. So, every search term carries an intent—as in, why users are searching for the term. The industry recognizes at least four types of search intent.
- Informational – for providing useful content
- Navigational – for front-running to a specific web page
- Commercial – for promoting goods and services
- Transactional – for helping with any purchase
Each intent is dominated by certain kinds of content. To point out, keywords with informational content tend to create results new to articles or blog posts. If your content doesn’t match the dominant type of content, it might struggle with search visibility.
Concluding after review search intent is as simple as studying the top ten results on the search engine results page. But, if you can afford it, you can sign up for ORGANIC DISCOVERY tools that already do the job for you.
Long story short, there are lots of on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY best practices. These are only the most widely used techniques, which are applicable to many situations.
On-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY is an effective way to help your website rank higher in Google search results. Granted, it isn’t the only way to do so, but on-page ORGANIC DISCOVERY factors pull a lot of weight in search result rankings. Your target customers will thank you for the quality content and when you really think about it user experience it can offer.
