Hi Mike,

Right I see. So Page rank does affect Search engine ranking but to a lesser extent than title and description matching a query.

It seems a bit of a black art this SEO!

Do google publish a hierarchical list of what affects your search ranking, or does it not do this, so people can't play the system. Hence it being such a black art!

From the info i have gathered, the following affect SE ranking:

1. Name and description matching common words and those in turn matching a query
2. Intro text on homepage backing up above
3. CSS and not tables used for HTML (unfortunatley our site is tables!)
4. Using the H1 and H2 tags. Again we haven't used these, and I think we could add some - any info on how to use these effectively anywhere, as I am not completely sure about what they do.
5. Content - I guess this has to back up point 1 and 2
6. Links - does this include both internal and external ones, and are external ones more important?
7. Page ranking
8. Dmoz registration backing up description.
9. Google doesn't take into account key words at all.

I know it is different for different search engines. But is this list roughly right, have I missed anything major off?

I really appreciate your time in giving me help with this.

Many Thanks

Sam