Introduction to Ranking Factors

Take a look at this article from SEOMOZ .org which contains a list of the factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase. Although it is impossible to say for certain which of these items affects which search engine or how important the factors are individually, the authors have created an estimated ranking importance scale to give readers an indication of how important each factor is.

According to the contributors the most important factors are:

1. Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Links
3. Keyword Use in Documents
4.Accessibility of Document
5.Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
6. Primary Subject Matter
7. External Links to a Linking Pages (the authority of those pages that linking to the document)
8. Link Popularity
9. Global Link Popularity of Site
10. Keyword Spamming

So concentrate on the title tags, anchor text and incoming links.