I study over 400 different factors on websites to attempt to determine what search engines are giving benefit to, and what they don't like. These factors include areas that you might expect: page title, content of a page, and type of codes in the HTML of the site. What you may not think of initially are factors such as domain name, URL factors (like filenames and foldernames), and the size of a website (number of pages).

Let's quickly review what my current research shows to be fairly universal across the three major search engines.

Firstly, every page of your site needs a Skopos (which is Greek for target, mark or goal). This skopos should be one very highly-targeted key word or phrase. This is the word(s) that someone will be typing into a search engine to find this particular page.

Title Tags - Make sure each page of your site has a different title tag. Use the keyphrase of the page at the very beginning of the title, and try to keep the title as short as possible, while being very inviting to people so they'll click the search listing when they see you in a search engine.

Meta Tags - While most SEOs have written the Keywords Meta, and the Description Meta tag off as useful for SEO, my stats show that the engines most certainly still use them. Especially the Description Meta. It is used in the description of your search listing in Yahoo, for one. Use them for what they were created: describe your page accurately in the description, and list the keywords that relate to the page in the keywords meta.

Body Copy - There's lots of bantering about keyword density of your page content. Depending on the search engine, this has small relevance to your rankings, or downright nothing to do with them. Just make sure the content of the page relates to the page topic (skopos) and don't worry about the % density.

URL - Having the keyword of the page in the domain name is good. Better to start the domain name with it... and best to have the domain only be the keyword and nothing else. It's also beneficial to have the subdomain be your keyword, but only the keywords and no other letters. Keywords in the folder structure or filename are of absolutely no benefit; and in fact are negative with some engines. With Google, in particular, having the URLs of your site pointing to folders rather than files is good.

I'm going to lump some things together into off-site factors. For one, linking is usually associated with off-site optimization, but there are internal links within your site that are certainly on-site factors. Just look at them in the same light as off-site links and you'll be fine.

Domain Registration - Believe it or not, there are a number of different factors in the search engines that relate to your domain name registration. For one, how old is your domain? Domains that have been around a long time tend to do better in the search engines; especially Yahoo. There's also some weight given in Google to domains that are registered for a full 10 years. The only other domain registration factor that you need to worry about is Private Registration. At most registrars, you can specify to have your registration made "private"; so your details remain hidden when someone does a domain WHOIS lookup. If you're after top search rankings, this is not good. All three engines downgrade you as a result of not being able to trust that the ownership of a site is above-board.

Linking - The absolute most dramatic effect on your site rankings has to do with the incoming links to the page; especially in Google. The more sites, and the more important the sites, that link to you; the more obviously important your site is.

Much of SEO has to do with getting other sites to link to you in a wide variety of ways. It's a study all its own; and I won't go into it here. Suffice is to say, get other sites to link to you. The more important the site, the better. Get them to use the keyword of the page they're linking to in the anchor text of the link (the blue underlined text that users click on). Same for internal links: use the anchor text of the page linked TO in the anchor text.

Other off-page factors include elements of trust. Google apparently has a "trustrank" figure assigned to sites. The more it feels it can trust you, the higher this score. This number is influenced by a whole bunch of things, many of which are unstudyable, perhaps even unknowable. For example, I personally trust that a business is real if it's listed in the yellow pages. Do search engines look at white and yellow page listings? There are a number of trusted Web Directories on the Internet. It's assumed that they are trusted by Google and other search engines to link only to real, useful sites. These include the Yahoo Directory, and the Open Directory Project (at dmoz.org). Do your best to get listed in them!