Does Keyword Count Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Most
SEO professionals will tell you that the number of times a keyword
is repeated on a page (keyword count) and the ratio of how often
that keyword is used in relation to other text (keyword density)
are minor search engine ranking factors.
However, they will then go on to tell you to be very careful not
to go over the "limit" or your site will be penalized.
What is the limit? How many times should you repeat your keyword?
You usually won't get that answer from your friendly neighborhood
SEO, because they simply haven't done the study to find out. We
have. Enjoy the results.
The
methodology: I gathered the results of the queries I naturally
performed last month using the leading search engine and analyzed
them.
I
had to visit each page and count the number of times the keyword
was used in between the body and /body tags. Those keyword counts
were then tabulated for the first 10 rankings and converted into
a normalized "ranking correlation".
The
resulting number shows each group of keyword counts (grouped in
ten's to reduce the amount of data required for a valid statistical
analysis) normalizing into a number between ~100 and +100 showing
the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower.
A
value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order
to show that pages of the studied size ALWAYS rank HIGHER than
pages of another size. A value of ~100 shows that all 10 rankings
were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied size
ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another size. Numbers in between
show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between
~100 and +100.
That
is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have groups
of keyword counts varying from 1 to 130. I stopped at 130 because
the number of sites found with keyword counts higher than 130
were too few to consider statistically valid.
Here
is the graph:
There
is no natural shape to the resulting graph. This probably indicates
that the leading search engine does not actually use this factor
directly in their algorithm.
However,
the general trend is upward. There appears to be no cut-off point
where pages with more keywords are ranked lower. If such a cutoff
exists, it is more than 130 repetitions of a keyword.
There
are two interesting peaks. The first is between 11 and 20 repetitions
of the keyword. This is probably the most useful peak for normal
pages (articles, paragraphs of text, etc.) since pages with 1-10
repetitions of the keyword rank so poorly in comparison.
The
next peak of the graph is between 81 and 90 repetitions of the
keyword. Wow! See if you can get your SEO to guess how many keyword
repetitions is "too many". I'm willing to bet that they
will say something far less than 81 repetitions.
Notes:
1.
Over 1,000 queries and over 10,000 sites were examined for this
study.
2.
There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords.
I merely took a random sampling of the queries I performed during
the month.
Conclusion:
Pages
with their target keyword repeated 11-20 times or 81- 90 times
rank best on the leading search engine!
If
there is a "cutoff" point where too many repetitions
of a keyword result in much lower ranking, we didn't find it.
Pages with up to 121 repetitions of the keyword continue
to rank higher than pages with 1-10 repetitions of the keyword.
This
is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engine purposefully entertains
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that this search
engine does, in fact, rank pages with the above keyword counts
higher than pages with other keyword counts used in the study.
Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and
authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
