Does Keyword Count In The Title Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
Almost
all SEO's agree that having your keywords in the "title"
tag is important for ranking. Is it? We decided to answer this
extremely simple question for the two leading search engines using
a simple statistical analysis. We also decide to find out if repeating
your keyword more than once was a factor in ranking.
The
methodology: I gathered the results of the queries that were naturally
performed last month by myself and three associates using the
two leading search engines and analyzed them. I had to visit each
page and count the number of times the keyword (the search term)
was used between the title and /title tags.
Those
keyword counts were then tabulated for the first 10 rankings and
finally converted into a normalized "ranking correlation".
The results for each of the two leading search engines were kept
separate so that we could discover any differences between the
two leading search engines for this factor.
The
resulting graphs show each keyword count normalized 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 value ALWAYS rank HIGHER
than pages of another value.
A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper
order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank LOWER
than pages of another value. 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 the
keyword counts from 1 to 3. I stopped at 3 because the number
of sites found with the keyword repeated more than 3 times in
the title were too few to consider statistically valid.
Here
are the graphs for each of the two leading search engines:
The
result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines rank sites
having a keyword count of two (2) in the title higher than pages
having any other number of keywords in the title tag.
Notes:
1.
Over 4,000 queries and over 40,000 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 performed by myself
and three associates during the month.
Conclusion:
Pages
with a keyword count of two (2) between the title and /title tag
rank higher than pages of other keyword densities on both of the
leading search engines.
This
is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from
this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain
this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that these search
engines do, in fact, rank pages with the search term (keyword)
repeated twice in the title 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
