The question of ranking factor importance is huge. Google uses hundreds of data points to rank sites, and it’s inefficient (and stupid) to try to attack every single piece of the algorithm on every site. Time is best spent hitting on the stuff that Google weighs most. I’ve always contended that meta titles are one of the most important ranking factors in the Google Algo, meta descriptions are one of the most important factors in encouraging click thrus, and meta keywords are basically unimportant (but I include them anyway because it’s easy enough).
The data below shows rankings from three time series – each one a month apart. The site is approximately one year old. The blue line is month one, the red line is month two and the orange line is the most recent month. In between there was little to no link building that occurred. The data set includes 350 targeted keywords spread out over more than just over 112 pages – approximately 3.5 keywords per page.
As you can see, the data is really pretty compelling. For all three of the major search engines the changes greatly increased keywords ranked in the first three positions. For Google, while the frequency of keyword ranking in all positions 1 through 9 increased month over month, the hotspot is right around position 3 through 7. Yahoo saw the most activity in positions 1 and 2. And Bing, as you can see, is a bit more sporadic. But just a quick glance at the numbers reveals that the most activity occurred between positions 1 and 7.
Combined, the most frequent ranking for a keyword in all three search engines across all three months was 3.
Most of the keywords are for local search specific terms, so the competition for much of this is lower than for other sites. But I can tell you that these ranking changes represented a 28% increase in traffic over that same period – an astronomical increase considering that this is a site with quite a bit of traffic already, that already ranks well for many of its keywords.
These rankings aren’t particularly important as standalone points of data. But when taken in context, they show that meta titles, in particular, are extremely important with regard to ranking for all three search engines. Alas, I guess that means that meta titles are not one of those things that we should throw out. Probably one of the more important ranking factors if they can influence the rankings so much. I suppose that means I need to do a post on how to write good titles so that ya’ll can have traffic increases like this site’s traffic increased.
