Studying the relationship between keyword density and your search ranking for those keywords can reveal interesting clues about how to write search engine friendly copy. Many SEOs believe this type of study, however, is a waste of time, as analysis typically reveals that our natural keyword densities are in line with what ranks well on Google.
That said, there’s a new report out from the guys who brought us the Google keyword density analysis. As they put it, “the goal of this analysis is to compare the keyword density elements of Yahoo’s new algorithm with Google’s algorithm.”
They compared 2000 low traffic, non-competitive keywords in the hopes of seeing the algorithms more clearly, without any possible search engine tweakings related to high-traffic keywords.
Their findings are interesting. Should you go and rebuild your site based on these findings? Maybe not. It’s worth a look though:
“The first major difference that jumps out in the Yahoo results is the preference Yahoo’s algorithm seems to have for more words on a page. The average number of words on a page for Google was 943 while Yahoo’s average words per page in the top 10 results was 1305.”
“Yahoo had an average keyword density of 19.6% while Google’s title keyword density is 16.9% for the results compiled.”
“Link text results show that Yahoo prefers less link text words on a page and more keyword occurrences within those words.”
Their conclusion?
“While the keyword density is almost identical, Yahoo’s is 3.4% compared to Google’s 3.6%, Yahoo definitely seems to have a preference for pages with more bold text (92 words compared to 65 words) and more occurrences (1.7 repeats for Yahoo compared to Google’s 0.7).”
What do you think of the data?
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
