What does the community think are the factors?
These are some of the speculations:
- High traffic site
- Well structured site navigation hierarchy
- Internally linking across the site
- Strong click through rates from the search results page.
- Non redundant meta and titles
- Evenly spread traffic across internal pages (as opposed to most of the traffic going to a single page).
- Rich content on individual pages
In fact, Izy CMS AI automatically normalizes the content you push to achieve some of these effects.
There is also speculation that google collections usage and analytics on the end user click through and chrome and android usage and feeds that data back into the ranking algorithm.
Webmaster Guidelines
They are along the same lines and focus on things like make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links, etc.
Also, the more you rely on native HTML structures (links, navs, ul, etc.) the better.
The importance of branding language and naming
All the pages titles and meta descriptions should center and emanate from the main brand name and context, especially for the home page and pages linked from the main navigation. This will have a direct impact on the search indexing and the overall bounce rate.