Things that this article will cover which search engines use to determine your positioning are:
Domain Maturity
Anchor Texts
HTML Attributes
Site Popularity – Linking Strategies
Title Tags and Headings
Lists (Ordered and Unordered)
Content Formatting (Bolding and Italics)
Site Layout and Design
Keywords
Keyword Density
Content & Content Placement
Page Doctypes
Geo-Targeting
Meta Data
Code Bloat Reduction
XML Site Maps
Website Log Analyzation
404 Error Handling
Robots.txt
BlackHat Techniques to Avoid