Does Location Of Your Keyword Affect Ranking?
by © Jon Ricerca
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:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dfg02.gif
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dfy02.gif
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.
About the Author:
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Copyright © Jon Ricerca
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