SEO: What do Search Engines look for?

Part 2: Things Search Engines Look For in brief ~ Link Popularity (Check Page Rank in Google's case). ~ How may other web pages around the Internet point to your web site? ~ Are these pages related to each other? ~ Are they considered valuable resources? ~ Anchor Text of inbound links ~ Does the link to your web site have relevant keywords in it? ~ Even if it is not directly relevant, a web page that is important that links to your site will still help your web site. ~ Presence on marked authority pages. (DMOZ) ~ Url quotation - i.e. when a page mentions the site by url but doesn't link to it. This commonly occurs in news articles that mention web sites. While it doesn't count as a link, it does count as a reference.  Number of links on pages linking to this page. If the link to your web site is the only one from a page, it's viewed as being more valuable than being one link among 100. ~ Freshness of links on pages linking to your web site. While the engines will count all links, a link from a web site that has not been updated in a year or two will be less valuable than from one that is updated daily. It indicates activity / interest levels. ~ Page Last Modified (Freshness) - just like the last point a page that is updated frequently is favored. ~ Reciprocal Links- Search engines like to see a closed loop - that a referring site as also used as a reference. So when you are giving away a link, ask for one back. It will help both websites. ~ Keyword frequency across all pages. Does the content really talk to the subject which the page and the web site is supposed to be about? ~ Keywords in the url: Using keywords in the url does have an effect for the search engine algorithms. ~ You can use keywords in the filename. For example if the page is about ford parts, then call it "http://www.sitename.com/car-parts.html" use dashes "-" and not underscores "_" to separate words in filenames. ~ Response Time - If your site is fast, it's favored. ~ Server Downtime - If the search engine robot comes by and frequently can't connect sometimes, they penalize your site. ~ Page Size - The engines tend to weigh content at the start of a document more than content further down. If a page is long, look at breaking it into sections. If a page is over 50k, then it's too long.