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

(Note to webmasters/ezine editors: You are welcome to hot
link to these graphs or even copy them to your own site.
You are also welcome to remove this note.)

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

Reproduced with permission.