Ranking Criteria
Search Engines use algorithms to determine your sites ranking. One of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page.
For example if you were to search for the keyword travel, search engines will give a higher ranking to a site with travel in the HTML title tag of the website, as it is assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. They will also check to see if the search keyword appears near the top of a web page, such as in the heading or in the first few paragraphs of text.
Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyse how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.
Every search engine has different variants on how they record information in their indexing, which means that if you searched the same keywords on several search engines you would not get the same result.
Search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the index, if they detect search engine "spamming." An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings. Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users.
Search Engines also use off the page factors eg. "link analysis". By analysing how many pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be important and thus deserving of a ranking boost.
Another off the page factor is click through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors.
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