by Jon Ricerca

 

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:

 

 

(Note to Webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above

graphs, text link to them or even copy them to your own

site.)

 

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: