Google's most important ranking factors

1) Content
a- Keyword in Title Tag
b- Keyword in regular text
c- Keyword toward top section of the page
d- Keyword in Heading Tags H1, H2, H3
e- Keyword in links
f- Keyword in image file names
g- Keywor in Meta Tags
h- Keyword in Alt Tags
i- Keyword in comments

2) Links
a- Total number of incoming links
b- Links from high PR sites or authorative sites
c- On-topic Links
d- Having Keywords in the anchor text of incoming links
f- Having keywords in internal links within the site and menues
g- Age of the incoming links (Currently links less than 3-6 months old, may not even get counted)
h- One-way links may get more credit than 2-way or recprical Links
i - Links coming from pages with less outgoing links are better. Links coming from pages with over 100 links are no good.

3) Factors that may count against you
a- Too much keyword repetition
b- Hidden content via text same color as background or CSS or other such methods
c- Javascript Redirects or certain other redirects
d- Cross linking bunch of sites to eac other in the same network
e- Doorway pages. Pages that are specifically written for search engines and cannot be found by your site visitors via your normal navifation menues.
f- PPC (SPAM/Pills/Casino) : Adult, Pharmacy and Casino related content
g- Duplicate content : watch out for those duplicate filters. Make sure your site doesn't have content from other sites or no one else has copied you.
h- Age of your domain. Brand new or less than 6-month old domains may be in the Google Sandbox
i- Participating in Link Farms or services that try to artificially increase your links by doing shortcuts
j- Cloaking : Showing a page to search engines different than what the users see based on their IP address


4) Factors that won't count against you, but are problems
a- Dynamic content, such as shopping cart based content may not get indexed
b- Primarily Graphic or Flash based websites
c- Javascript content and/or menus (navigation)