Constructing Excellence, A to Z Information: Pareto Voting

Why the hell am I linking to some random UK construction website? Because I've been dabbling in thoughts of search engine optimization of course. Here follows a number of un-proven (by me) observations about how to achieve good Google ranking, to be concluded with the new idea generated by the above link. Good Google ranking might be obtained via:

1. clean code. reduce the signal vs. noise using semantic markup. it will make your keywords a higher percentage of the total contents of the page. for search engines that stop reading a page after a given number of characters it will guarantee that your content is among those characters.
2. links. this is why blogs often jump to the top, they link to each other. but more than that, link to each other in a meaningful way, using descriptive link text and often following them up with commentary.
3. content freshness. a regularly updated site will do better than a static site, if for no other reason than that a page's value is calculated in the context of the site as a whole, and regular updates means that the site as a whole is generally better fleshed out and more relevant than one that was just built and left to rot.
4. focused content. a page devoted to the keywords entered in a search will rank higher than a page that mentions those keywords in passing. this is why i think definition pages like the above link will do so well in Google. a page that can answer, "what the hell is ____?" is a useful page, and therefore deserves high rank.