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For instance, keyword density -- some people say you should have much higher density. With the exact keywords.
But that doesn't seem to be the case, at least for all the tests I'm doing.
Search, for example: *kw1 kw2*
Site 1 in Yahoo has kw1 once in a meta desc tag and once on the page. kw2 appears 7 times, in title, meta desc, h1, and 4 times in p tags.
Site 2 in Yahoo has kw1 a grand total of 0 times. That's zero, as in *the keyword does not appear at all*. kw2 appears 3 times, once in title and twice in p tags. Close check of the cached site shows it was in a meta keywords tag when Yahoo crawled.
I'm checking now to see what I can find about backward links... It sure looks like off-page factors must be more important. But I've heard exactly the opposite here, too.
I don't think anybody knows, and I bet Yahoo is still madly working with their algo to get results that are different enough from Google that they can differentiate, and good enough that they can brag. They're not there yet.