Robert_Charlton - 8:02 am on Feb 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

i read with interest this post but am still confused as to what search engines rteally look for?

paul - We don't want to take this thread off onto a general SEO primer, but to answer your question briefly, take a look at this thread:

Brett's quick rank point system
[webmasterworld.com...]

On the thread, various members assign "points" to quantify the relative importance of the kinds of things that search engines look at.

You'll note that Brett, in post #5, gives 10 points each to the title and to inbound link text. You'll see that most of the posts assign the heaviest weight, as Brett does, to title and to inbound link text. And with the new Google algo, and on Teoma, eg, it also matters who the link is from.

Also, see my comments in the thread about the effect of the domain name, which I feel has more to do with inbound link text than with weight assigned to a url.

Confused by all the rights and wrongs of getting good pr

Note that "PR" or "PageRank" is not the same as the ranking on a search. I'd do a site search or use Google to search WebmasterWorld to get some good definitions of what PageRank is. There's also a definition on Google itself... comes up number one on a Google search for "PageRank".