Nothing is more central to the onpage SEO than keyword selection and deployment.  I know I harp on this, but the search engines are trying to gauge relevancy, and they still do it mostly the old-fashioned way:  they read text.  What’s on your page is one of the two major sources of information (‘signals’ in insider lingo) the SEs use to rank your page.

A few days ago one of my favorite writers, P.J. Fusco of the ClickZ network, published some keyword analysis research that tested how the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) ranked pages for the keyword ‘fitness equipment’.  I instantly grabbed her table graphic showing results for my afternoon presentation at the Central Coast Wedding Professionals’ monthly meeting because the hows and whys of keywords on pages is so basic to SEO.

PJ Fusco's summary chart for keyword impact on rankings

There’s a lot of information here, but one take away is that the SEO guy who tries to play by fixed ‘rules’ (you need exactly 12 mentions of your keyword!) is wrong.  The variability is much higher than would fit with nice neat rules like that.  That’s not surprising when you realize Google uses in the neighborhood of 200 signals to evaluate a page (according to a number of bloggers — whatever the exact number, it isn’t trivial).

In fact, in a table I do not reproduce here, PJ found that the #1 ranking site for ‘fitness equipment’ on MSN does not use the keyword in the meta description, URL, alternative text, link text, bold or italicized text, or <H1> headers.  What the heck is that about?

Well, there’s inbound links for one thing.  There’s history.  There’s (mostly unknown) behavioral factors.  We do not know what is in those algorithms, no matter how much we test.

Does this mean you can/should ignore the onpage keyword SEO?  Of course not.  Especially if you don’t have tons of great, high quality inbound links, or your site is relatively new, but even if you are doing well in rankings — do what you can to make your site relevant to specific keyword queries that match your content and your offer. The broader message of the research is that 100% of the ranking sites used the keyword phrase in the title tag; the big majority used it in the meta description; and so forth (see the table).

As I always say, it’s not rocket science.  But it does require some research, attention to detail, and followup.  Success is the reward for thoughtful persistence.