SEO ROCK

The search engines measure historical and current percentage of change. They look for the amount of content that has changed in a document over the course of updates and which parts of the documents have experienced change over time. 

Paragraph headings, from H1, to H6 or simply through the use of formatting may give different parts of a page or sections of the documents their groupings with similar themes and can differentiate different parts of a web document from our parts. 

 

This can be very important for less competitive terms. Also becomes easier for the search engine to understand the theme of the document without looking at other documents.

The text in the alt tags and image tags is used with the overall text in your document,  it is mainly used in targeting image search results at the search engines with the file name also taken into consideration. The alt tag must explain the picture and not be filled by keywords, although you can incorporate your keywords in the alt tag with the overall optimization of your website, but keywords stuffing should be avoided.
It is also important for clickable images which may pass some page rank and the alt tag could be used as the anchor text which may pass some relevance also.

The search marketing company Fortune Interactive conducted a study in which they wanted to find out what factors influence web site rankings on the three major search engines. Read on to get the results.

in most documents, specially those with lengthy content and a hierarchy or structure present, the order of the words, phrases, sentences, the overall flow of the paragraphs can be taken into consideration by the search engines.

sequence, proximity, priminence are important factors.

html formatting H1, H2, H3, bold, ordered lists, onpage anchor links can also be considered important.

These are structural signs that the content in the document if of high quality. The full extent of its implementation is unknown as the factors are not known. For example spelling mistake, grammar mistakes and punctuations could be important factors in this automated analysis, I know as a fact that many search engines have spent a lot of time and money in perfecting the technology to analyze the content on any document and to index it appropriately. This way the search engine can measure the relevance of any document.

We can also add the use of H1, H2, H3 and other heading and subheadings, quotations, citations, ordered lists, un-ordered lists as factors used in determining the value in terms of relevance and quality of a webpage.

Citations commonly known as footnotes or endnotes in a research paper, white papers and other literary documents and research artilces are links to additional information or mention of other related documents.

It can refer to documents consulted in preparation of a thesis, this factor is importnat in academic or scholarly searches done of Google Scholar and other related searches.

The outgoing links from an article or document also help in determining relevance of that document so this is an important factor in research papers, white papers etc.

Nearly every document on teh internet has an inception date which is calculated by the search engines at the first time the crawler finds the page on the internet by following a link to that document from another webpage. The older the document, the the more valuable, authoritative and trusted it becomes.

The age of the document also effect the queries which are specific to time, for example if some one searching for the cricket worldcup of 1996, so most probably the doucments which covered the game back in the year 1996 would come up.

Same way, new document would be more important for anyone searching for the latest news reagarding the cricket world cup 2007.

The older the pages, the more in-comming liks they have, so they would mostly rank well.

Nowadays, blogs are quite important as they display the latest information on them.

It is also one of the hardest things to manipulate as you cannot cheat the search engines in this.

Google is taking the age of the document very seriously and taking this factor into account.

The incomming links to a website can positively or negatively influence your website rankings significantly based on the quality of the incomming link, the page rank of the corrosponding page, the the relationship between the page with other pages on the same website.

In this regard, the anchor text is also very important. Anchor text is the hyperlink text which usually says, click here to visit my website etc.

One should be careful not get links from link farms or so called bad neighbourhoods. You can safely include websites selling links nowadays as the search engines would just discount such links in future.