Same Tags and Keywords But No High Rankings

We sometimes see our x-cart clients attempting to match the title tags and keywords of the websites first in google for their keywords, and then not understanding why they don't rank the same as their competitor. In a recent post Jill Whalen addresses this issue referencing the following factors in search engine ranking:

• the age of the website
• the age of the page
• the overall popularity of the website on the Internet as a whole
• the overall popularity of the page with respect to other pages within the website
• the authority and trust factor of the domain
• the words being used within the visible content of the page
• the words used in anchor text pointing to the page
• the words used in alt attribute text pointing to the page, and
• about 90 other, less important factors!