In my opinion, these are Google's most important ranking factors. Some of these may or may not be actual ranking factors and some may not be significant.

1) Content
a- Keyword in Title Tag
b- Keyword in regular text
c- Keyword toward top section of the page
d- Keyword in Heading Tags H1, H2, H3
e- Keyword in links
f- Keyword in image file names
g- Keywor in Meta Tags
h- Keyword in Alt Tags
i- Keyword in comments

2) Links
a- Total number of incoming links
b- Links from high PR sites or authoritative sites
c- On-topic Links
d- Having Keywords in the anchor text of incoming links
f- Having keywords in internal links within the site and menus
g- Age of the incoming links (Currently links less than 3-6 months old, may not even get counted)
h- One-way links may get more credit than 2-way or reciprocal Links
i - Links coming from pages with less outgoing links are better. Links coming from pages with over 100 links are no good.

3) Factors that may count against you
a- Too much keyword repetition
b- Hidden content via text same colour as background or CSS or other such methods
c- Javascript Redirects or certain other redirects
d- Cross linking bunch of sites to each other in the same network
e- Doorway pages. Pages that are specifically written for search engines and cannot be found by your site visitors via your normal navigation menus.
f- PPC (Porn/Pills/Casino) : Adult, Pharmacy and Casino related content
g- Duplicate content : watch out for those duplicate filters. Make sure your site doesn't have content from other sites or no one else has copied you.
h- Age of your domain. Brand new or less than 6-month old domains may be in the Google Sandbox
i- Participating in Link Farms or services that try to artificially increase your links by doing shortcuts
j- Cloaking : Showing a page to search engines different than what the users see based on their IP address

4) Factors that won't count against you, but are problems
a- Dynamic content, such as shopping cart based content may not get indexed
b- Primarily Graphic or Flash based websites
c- Javascript content and/or menus

In addition check out the Google Webmaster Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Bruce Gow specialises in search engine optimisation, internet marketing
& article submission.

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Tags: search engines, google, title tag, doorway pages, anchor text, reciprocal links, dynamic content, repetition, navigation menus, shortcuts, 100 links, meta, ppc, image file, shopping cart, file names, pills