Some major factors are listed below. Also see the How Search Engines Rank Web Pages article for a more in-depth look at how relevancy is determined, and the Search Engine Design Tips page for helpful advice about optimizing your pages for search engines. Some search engines that support the meta description and keywords tag will also give pages an extra boost if search terms appear in these areas. Not all search engines that support the tags also give a ranking boost. As described above, all search engines can determine the popularity of a page by analyzing how many links there are to it from other pages.
Some engines give pages with lots of links, or links from important web sites, a relevancy boost.
Direct Hit Boosts Rankings Direct Hit is a system that measures what users click on from search results in order to refine relevancy rankings. This shows which search engines use this as a factor. This is where a word is repeated many times in a row. If the search engines spot a spamming technique, they may downgrade a page's ranking or exclude it from listings altogether. The items below cover design elements that could cause a spam penalty.