Still on the subject of Google ranking factors: Here's another good summary of the things the search engine giant deems most important:

One of these is not often cited, but still something you should focus on - particularly if you have a blog. And that is that Google takes into account the quality and relevance of the sites that you link to.

In short, if you are citing quality articles and blog posts that are relevant to the point that you are making then it will reflect well back on your own blog. That's why I would suggest searching the news aggregators often - Google News being the biggest and best.

This will this bring you the most authoritative sites - with the big companies like CNN and News Ltd having high page rank, usually 6 or above. These sites are also really stable and enduring, which is important. Even if the article or blog post in question gets removed and you end linking to a blank page, the main URL will still be there.

Smaller sites and blogs, however, are often being run by individuals in their spare time and sometimes end up going belly up. The domains get picked up and used by other webmasters - some of them building gambling and sex sites. It's possible that if you do a lot of linking out to such blogs, you could eventually end up linking to a "bad neighborhood" without knowing it, and subsequently be penalized.

I've just found a good Google ranking factor checklist. The page does seem to be fairly old - at least a couple of years. However, it still serves as a good summary of the best and worst things you can do for your site's SEO.

It's clearly an authoritative resource. I did a backlink check on Yahoo for it and it's got over 1400 sites linking to it And a lot of them are very well known themselves. So, it's definitely worth a look.

Of course, a lot of the information on that page would be gobbledygook to the newbie webmaster. However, a lot of isn't, too! If you just applied a few of the concepts it contains you'd be making some really positive steps SEO-wise.

Just a thought on putting location keywords into your pages: Of course these are vital if you are a bricks and mortar business. It's the most obvious way of drawing in localized, high converting traffic.

And people do a lot of searching for information about various locations - all the way from the country level down to suburbs and even streets! Of course, a high proportion of these searches relate to accommodation and real estate. But there are other general themes as well.

Even when you get down to the suburb level, it's quite surprising just how many searches there are. Type your suburb into Google's keyword tool and you'll see what I mean.

That's why it's always a good idea to include such words if you want that localized traffic. You're bound to corner some long-tail keyword searches eventually. And it can be useful to list neighbouring suburbs as well.

Say you're a plumber in Yokine. Obviously you should target that word specifically, repeating it a few times and perhaps even bolding it. But you could also include a line like: "We also service surrounding areas including Tuart Hill, Joondanna, Coolbinia and Nollamara."

The more I blog, the more I realize the importance of putting keywords in the title of blog posts. Of course you can use various tools to help you choose them. But quite often hunches can work quite well.

A recent example: With the Australian election campaign now in full swing, people are Googling like crazy for opinion and information on it. Of course, they often search for the names of politicians. With this in mind, I wrote a post on my humor and opinion blog about a recent event involving Mark Latham and Julia Gillard. I put their two surnames in the title. Just as I'd hoped, I managed to jag a first page listing (just) for searches for "Gillard+Latham".

I haven't had a flood of hits, but visitors from this search are trickling in consistently. So, don't be afraid to trust your gut in keyword selection, particularly when there's a lot of interest around your chosen subject.

In order to speed up the indexing of information, search engines skip over certain words. These are called "stop words". It's a good idea to avoid using them if possible, particularly in titles.

There is quite a surprisingly large number of them. Here's a good list.