Area rows on the Page Analysis table that begin with "Top Averages" contain statistics for the average scores of top ranking pages for the selected search engine. These averages are re-computed periodically by the staff at FirstPlace Software and incorporated into Page Critic Knowledge Base updates. The averages are based on the analysis of hundreds of top ranking pages across dozens of different keyword searches.
Although these scores are not guaranteed to get you to the top for your keyword, they will definitely give you valuable help on what the averages are for top ranking pages.
For these lines to appear, you must select the option on the Settings tab of the Page Critic screen.
AVERAGES WILL VARY: You will also notice that these averages will VARY depending on whether you are doing an exact match keyword analysis, a non-exact match analysis, or an analysis of a single keyword (rather than a multi-word phrase). Since the search engines often return a different set of statistics depending on the type of search conducted, we've incorporated three different sets of "averages" within the knowledge base to more closely match the type of search you are optimizing for. In other words, the top averages for the phrase "blue widgets" will not normally match the averages displayed for just "widgets."
When doing a non-exact match on a multi-word phrase, the frequency counts will often be much higher since it will count the occurrence of ANY keyword within the phrase, rather than just matches on the entire phrase. In turn, your own pages should return frequency counts that are generally higher when optimizing on multi-word phrases if you wish to score well.
Warning about averages: Averages can be very helpful in many cases to determine trends. Generally you'll want to try and make your own page statistics come close to the averages for top ranking pages, or identify which averages are "significant." However, they can also be deceiving in other cases. For example, if a search engine scored pages highly that either had the keyword at the beginning of the title, OR at the end of the title, then WebPosition might report an average keyword prominence of 50%. However, in reality, most of the top ranking pages may have had 100% or 0% prominence scores. Putting your keyword in the middle of the title to match the "average" in this scenario would not help you.
Another potential pitfall of blindly following averages rests in the fact that there are MANY variables that a search engine ranks a page on, so you should be cautious before drawing any conclusions. For example, you might assume that since a majority of the pages on average had one or more keywords in their meta keyword tag, that the search engine supports keyword tags. However, since many Web masters use meta keyword tags regardless of whether the search engine supports them, this conclusion would be wrong, as the majority of search engines no longer support the meta keyword tag or consider it when determining relevancy and ranking.
TIP: For some competitive keywords, averages for many keywords may not give you statistics that are useful. You may wish to try the TOP X averages feature to see how the top ranking pages for YOUR keyword average for each statistic.