If you’ve ever taken a look at SEOmoz’s list of Search Engine Ranking factors you’ll see the things that SEOs always talk about as being important – links, anchor text of external links, where links come from, on-page keywords and keyword usage in the title tag. There’s no disputing that these things are really important. But it’s always fun to see the data visualized.
So, here it is. The following is data that was taken from a site with about 112 pages, where we are targeting about 350 keywords. The data shows ranking changes over the course of three months. The first month, changes were made, and no new links were actively built between months 2 and 3. From the first month’s baseline to the third month’s check-in, there was an 88% increase in keywords ranking in the top seven positions across all three search engines. It’s a number that’s skewed by Bing, however as both Google and Yahoo saw 113% and 94% increases respectively in keywords ranking in the first 7 positions. Bing, saw only a 50% increase.
The x-axis on all of the graphs is the keyword position, and the y-axis is the number of keywords ranking in that position.
Data isn’t fun. But good data is compelling. I was actually surprised by the results. I thought the data would skew positively like it does, but I didn’t expect it to be such an aggressive skew toward the top three results.
I’m not going to do any robust data analysis. I’m going to let the data visualization speak for themselves. Ultimately, these charts show the importance that the big three are putting on Meta titles. It makes a lot of sense too. Google expects that the data you want to show in the search results are going to be heavily correlated with the data on page (although this reality makes me wonder why Google doesn’t use the meta description as a significant ranking factor). While on-page text is definitely important, giving signals like good, well-constructed titles to the search engines is going to be hugely significant with regard to improving a site’s rankings for a specific keyword.
