Matthew Barby, the "learn SEO from a Pro" guy, has provided us all with an invaluable service to wrap up the year 2016: He's analyzed 1 million different URLs that appear on page 1 of Google. What he found is not necessarily surprising, but it's incredibly helpful. And a lot of what the analysis shows validates what we've been telling our clients for the past year. The 5 findings below highlight the importance of the ongoing SEO work that we at Eternity have been doing, and repeat the themes we've been discussing for some time.
- Backlinks matter. On average, the top 2 results on page 1 of Google represented 38% of all the backlinks from pages on page 1.
- Higher results, more links. The higher up page 1 the search result is, the greater the number of domains linking to it that the webpage has. Webpages ranking #1 had an average of 168% more linking domains than those ranking #5.
- Anchor text should be keyword-rich. Webpages ranking #1 had an average of 5.42% of their anchor text actually including their target keyword. The further up page 1 you look, the higher this percentage goes.
- Make titles brief. Top-ranking webpages tended to have titles around just 8 words in length.
- Include keywords in URLs. Pages that contain target keywords in their webpage address tended to rank higher in Google than those that didn’t.
