Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

PageRank is not the only factor that Google uses to rank search results. Google uses more than 200 “signals”to calculate the rank of a page. According to a survey of SEO experts, the top 10 most important factors include the following:

• Keyword use in title tag
• Anchor text of inbound link
• Global link popularity of site
• Age of site
• Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
• Topical relevance of inbound links to site
• Link popularity of site in topical community
• Keyword use in body text
• Global link popularity of linking site
• Topical relationship of linking page

The top factors that negatively affect a search engine spider’s ability to crawl a page or harm its rankings are as follows:

• Server often inaccessible to bots
• Content very similar to or duplicate of existing content in the index
• External links to low-quality/spam sites
• Duplicate title/meta tags on many pages
• Overuse of targeted keywords (indicative of stuffing/spamming)
• Participation in link schemes or actively selling links
• Very slow server response times
• Inbound links from spam sites
• Low levels of visitors to the site

source:  website optimization