Does Keyword Location On Page Affect Ranking?
by Jon Ricerca
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
One
of our members asked for a study of keyword location on a page.
Is it more effective to have your keyword mentioned in the top
third, middle third or bottom third of a page?
Here
is the methodology I used to answer this question. I gathered
the results of the queries naturally performed last month by myself
and three associates using Yahoo and Google. I then fetched the
pages and divided the body section into three equal parts for
each page. I tallied the results for the first 8 rankings on both
Yahoo and Google (keeping the results separate) and then converted
them into a percentage of the total results for each search engine.
Here
are the graphs showing Google and Yahoo results:
The X-axis shows the ranking (from #1 through #8) of the search
engine results in the study. The Y-axis shows the percentage of
domains that contained the keyword in the top (red line), middle
(blue line) and bottom (purple line) thirds of the body section
of the page.
It
is interesting to note that pages containing the keyword in the
top and bottom third of the body section ranked much better on
Google.
The
top section had a normalized correlation of +42 on a scale of
-100 to +100. The bottom third also showed a remarkable positive
correlation of +46 on the same scale. Having the keyword in the
middle third had no significant effect (no correlation whatsoever...
neither positive nor negative).
The
Yahoo results were even more interesting. I generally ignore any
correlations between -35 and +35 as being generally insignificant.
On Yahoo, none of the three sections showed any remarkable
correlations. The scores were a +17 for the top, -3 for
the middle and -17 for the bottom third of the body section. Does
this mean that Yahoo doesn't even look for the keyword in the
body section?
Advice:
Mention your keywords near the top and/or bottom of a page for
Google ranking.
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
