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Some factors affect a site's rank greatly, others have minimal effect, and no one knows what all the factors are or how they all really impact a given site.

Danny Sullivan has posted his thoughts on search engine ranking factors. What we know for sure, it seems, is that we don't know anything for sure. But we can guess.

One person who is guessing is Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz, who Mr. Sullivan references in his post; he agrees with a few things on the SEOmoz list, and disagrees with others:

I don't think external links are crucial for a page to do well, but that's my view and experience. Keyword use in the URL is a extremely minor factor to me -- I'd give it half a box or even less, if that was an option. He also stresses too much to me the idea about links coming in to your TLD or your root domain.
The top two items on the list of in-document factors, which SEOmoz denotes as having "exceptional importance," are title tags and keyword use in text:

•  Title Tag -- Denoted by the "title" tags in HTML, this single factor is the most important place to put targeted keywords.

•  Keyword Use in Document Text -- When search engines measure the use of keywords in a document, they typically use term weight as the method for calculating the relative importance of a term or phrase.
The list also discusses top-level domain factors, the value of links, and technical factors in impacting how far up or down a site may rank. A list of detrimental factors touches on areas that may cause a site to drop in rank, or worse, get banned by a search engine.

Mr. Sullivan thinks the best approach is still to develop the best content possible, and to make the site search engine friendly.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.