On "How to Rank #1 in Google"

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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. 

  1. Backlinks matter. On average, the top 2 results on page 1 of Google represented 38% of all the backlinks from pages on page 1.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Make titles brief. Top-ranking webpages tended to have titles around just 8 words in length.
  5. Include keywords in URLs.  Pages that contain target keywords in their webpage address tended to rank higher in Google than those that didn’t.

Get the full article here.