Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOZ has just released a report that summarizes the opinions of 37 different SEO industry contributors on the different ranking factors for achieving success in Google.  It’s a great reference document and well worth reviewing and keeping to hand. 

According to the study, the top 10 positive factors that effect Google rankings are:

1.    Keyword Use in Title Tag

2.    Global Link Popularity of Site

3.    Anchor Text of Inbound Link

4.    Link Popularity within the Site's Internal Link Structure

5.    Age of Site

6.    Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site

7.    Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

8.    Keyword Use in Body Text

9.    Global Link Popularity of Linking Site

10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

And the top 5 negative factors that can be detrimental to your ranking efforts are:

1.    Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots

2.    Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index

3.    External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites

4.    Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

5.    Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links