Key Takeaway from 1 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO

1. Getting links from a diverse group of domains is extremely important for SEO.
2. Increasing the number of links to your site may improve rankings for other pages on your site.
3. Writing comprehensive, in-depth content can help you rank higher in Google.
4. Long-form content ranks higher in Google’s search results than short-form content. The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words.
5. Because the association between HTTPS and ranking wasn’t especially strong — and the fact that switching to HTTPS is a resource-intensive project — we don’t recommend switching to HTTPS solely for SEO. But if you’re launching a new site, you want to have HTTPS in place on day one.
6. Feel free to use structured data on your site. But don’t expect it to have an impact on your rankings.

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7. Use short URLs whenever possible as they may give Google a better understanding about your page’s true topic. (permalink)
8. Using a single image is clearly better than zero images. Including lots of images doesn’t seem to have an impact on search engine rankings.
9. Including your target keyword in your title tag may help with rankings for that keyword. However, because of Semantic Search, the impact doesn’t appear to be nearly as great as it once was.
10. Fast-loading websites are significantly more likely to rank in Google.
11. Pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher than pages with fewer backlinks.
12. SEOs agree that backlink quality is just as important as backlink quantity. It is better to get a single link from an authoritative page than 100 links from 100 low-quality pages.
13. Backlinks with exact match anchor text robustly correlate with rankings. However, because of the risk in exact match anchor text links, we don’t advise utilizing exact match anchor text as an SEO tactic
14. Google may use bounce rate as a ranking signal. Or it may be a case of a correlation not equaling causation.