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.
Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca
About author: For more information and access to other
SearchEngineGeek.com reports, please visit:
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