This article contains a large 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 article contains an estimated ranking importance scale.

The following are the top 10 ranked factors across the 5 categories:

1. Title Tag – 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links – 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text – 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document – 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages – 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site – 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages – 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site – 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming – 3.69

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