SEO expert Brian Dean and his team wanted to better understand Content Marketing as it is today. To accomplish this mission, they analyzed 912 million blog-posts and survived to tell the tale.

In the article, Dean and his staff interpreted the data and came up with simple and feasible insights.

One of the most intriguing questions is what the optimal length of content is. The length of the content has a huge impact in terms of receiving links and also sharing in social media.

It's not yet clear why Google likes longer content. However, the data shows that content that is longer than 3,000 words receive 77.2 percent more links than content less than 1,000 words. In other words - if you want your content to be promoted in the search results – write more.

In addition, if we take a moment to look at Social Media, we find that the ideal length for a post is between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Content in this word range produce more shares on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other networks.

Another interesting statistic is that longer headlines give better results than shorter headlines. More precisely, titles should be between 14 to 17 words. Content with long titles is more widely shared across the Social Networks.

Maybe it's the next generation of clickbait, but Dean has two theories about this. He claims that long headlines give the internet surfer the additional information needed in order to understand why they should read the content. The second theory is that longer headlines give more opportunities to insert popular keywords for searches.

In addition, the three types of content that were good at getting links are:

- Articles of "why" – such as "Why do you have to sleep eight hours a night?"

- Articles of "what" – such as "What to take with you on a deserted island?"

- Infographics

On the other hand, “Why” and list posts have historically been the most successful types of content for Social Media.

One of the most amazing pieces of data in this article is the number of external links that articles receive on the web. In fact, it turns out that 94% of the articles in the world receive zero external links! In addition, only a little more than 2% of articles receive links from more than one source.

This research on Content Marketing has managed to find out a lot of interesting things such as it is really good to make the title of an article in the form of a question and that there is no such thing as a "good day" for publishing content. Rather than believe theories about the changing algorithms of Google and its friends, they decided to look into the meat of the data and draw their own new conclusions that had not been previously thought about.

The article offers some great conclusions from the research and accompanies it with great infographics, graphs, and additional aids in order to help you understand the data clearly.