POSITIVE RANKING FACTORS
It is, however, much more complicated than that - there are a wide variety of factors used to decide how high your website ranks in a company's search engine e.g.:
- keywords in the invisible meta tags, URLs, domain names, page titles and headers, links
- number of external links
- relevance of link text to the external web-page content
- number of incoming links (backlinks) to your site
- incoming links from high-ranking sites
- web page size
- freshness of pages (regular changes, new pages)
- number of pages, including ratio of new pages to old pages
- site navigation
- URL length
- site age (older is better)
- domain registration time (deemed to be more serious registering for 5 years)
- age of page vs. age of site
- site maps
- website listed in certain online directories (e.g. DMOZ, Yahoo)
- page and site traffic (number of visitors)
- time spent on a page
- how often is a page clicked on (CTR)
- is the website bookmarked by users?
- web server availability
Some factors are unknown outside the search engine optimisation community, and some remain corporate secrets.
NEGATIVE RANKING FACTORS
There are just as many negative factors that count against your site, such as:
- linking to bad external sites
- theft of images or textual content
- keyword spamming
- Flash or frames within your site makes website spidering impossible
- invisible text (same colour as the page background)
- duplicate content
- traffic buying
- zero links to your site
- link-buying
- website cloaking (page indexed by search engine differs to that displayed to users)
- web server unavailable whilst indexing takes place