Web Dev Ireland

Search engines do not release the list of criteria that they use to determine a pages ranking, so most of the information below has come from many people experimenting and seeing how high their ranking went while employing these tactics.

The main factors that will get you high rankings are as follows (in no particular order).

1) Your domain name: www.bigbluebanana.com will help you show up reasonably high on a search for “big blue banana”
2) Title tags: search engine robots rate the text in your titles pretty high (assuming you don’t abuse the tag and have 50 keywords in it)
3) H1 tags: again search engine robots rate the text in your h1 tags pretty high
4) The actual content of the page: the more unique your content the higher you will rate for the unique keywords (or combinations of keywords) e.g if you search for “big green polkadot boat” and you have these words in your content in that order you will rate highly for that term (depending of course on the number of instances of that phrase on the net)
5) Non-recriprocal, inbound links: this is probably the most important of them all, the more sites with links to your page (the higher their page rank the better) the better you will rank for the term in their A tag link to you e.g if you have 1000 links to you with the text “monkey man” as the text for the link you will rate highly for that term.
Note: apparently links from other higher ranking pages in the same “community” as your site can have more of an effect on you ranking. e.g. if your site is about football and other football sites link to you they help your ranking more then a link from a science website.
6) Meta tags: no where near as important as they used to be but still have some bearing.
7) Filenames of your pages: if your page is named photoshop_tutorial.php it will help your ranking for that search term.
8) A sitemap and a robot.txt file : search engines robots like to find these and as a result google and others up your ranking for being compliant (robot.txt only has a marginal effect).
9) Use X/HTML with CSS: if the robot/webcrawler doesn’t have to trawl through a load of style information it can give better results for your content.
10) The length of time your content has existed, the longer it exists the more times it will be crawled by spiders/robots. The Sandbox effect has a bearing if your site is only new.
There are a few more but they really only have very minor bearing on your ranking.

I hope the tips above are of some help to someone out there and if you have more of an interest in this topic google for “SEO techniques” the results near the top usually belong to the people who are best at SEO.