Some search engines (e.g. AltaVista) bases its ranking on both static factors (a computation of the value of a page independent of any particular query) and query-dependent factors. It values:

• Long pages rich in meaningful text (not randomly generated letters and words).

• Pages that serve as good hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related content (topic similarity, rather than random meaningless links such as those generated by link exchange programs intended to generate a false impression of "popularity").

• The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the "quality" ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is "good" if many pages at many different sites point to it and especially if many "good" sites point to it.
  Concentrate on getting reciprocal links with other sites which are similar to and complimentary to yours. There are specialist directories for finding people who want to swap links, try http://www.linkmarket.net or use the search engines and find out who is linked to your competitors. Write and propose swaps to the webmasters. You'll get as much targeted traffic from these links than you will from the search engines, plus having links back to your site will improve your ranking on the latter because of the way the link-popularity algorithms work. Make sure those who link to you are listed on the search engines. Do it for them if they are not.

• The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more important. If a page is buried too deep, the crawler simply won't go that far and will never find it.

These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new good pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it so others can build links to it, and so you know that it's in the index

Query-dependent factors include:

1. The HTML title.
2. The first lines of text.
3. Query words and phrases that appear early in a page rather than late.
4. METAtags, which are treated as ordinary words in the text that appear early in the page (unless the META tags are patently unrelated to the content on the page itself, in which case the page will be penalized).
5. Words mentioned in the "anchor" text associated with hyperlinks to your pages. (e.g., if lots of good sites link to your site with anchor text "breast cancer" and the query is "breast cancer," chances are good that you will appear high in the list of matches).

Keep in mind that in any query, rare words count more than common words. If someone searches for fruit and pomegranates, pages with the word pomegranates will appear at the top of the list (a technique known as "inverse document frequency"). Hence you should use specific terms on your pages, in your anchors, and in your META tags, not general ones that won't give you any advantage. Be specific whenever you can.