What on page factors does Google use in today's algorithms?

• I understand and totally agree that Content and making the page User Friendly is more important than ever with the current ‘SEO rules’ from Google in mind, at least as far as On-page SEO goes.

  The big question for me is how content and UX are graded. Specifically, before a page is visited by a human and could provide Google with data via the Chrome Browser about time on page etc. Google MUST have a way of calculating the ‘value’ of the content and how user friendly it is.

  To me this is the ‘egg’ part of the chicken and egg story. The ‘egg’ being a webpage not seen by Google or anyone else before, that is analyzed and given a ‘value’ ranking. This is then used as a basis for any later search related ranking procedure, pages with ‘higher value’ rankings being more likely to get a position at the top of the search results.

  So, the big question is - Do we know what the signals are for the on-page part of the Google algorithm? I understand that the following are taken into account, but am I missing some?

  • Title of Page
  • Description of Page (not truly used, but a lot of poor ones can degrade an entire sites quality, so I have been told)
  • Header Tags on the pages (although these are not as powerful and many sites break the ‘rules’ about using them and still get high ranks)
  • Bold, Italics, lists
  • Words used (more on this later)
  • Links out to relevant / useful sites (although I have seen comments from SEO professionals who also say this is not a useful signal)
  • Embedding videos
  • Using Images with the ‘descriptive’ file names and ALT text, and GeoTagging them for LOCAL SEO

  Plus, on the UX side...

  • Using whitespace
  • Not allowing too many adverts at the head of page
  • Ensuring that the above the fold area is not just images (the use of Carousels is said, by some to be harmful, but is used extensively and many sites still get a high rank).

  I do want to come back to the fact that Google uses a computer program to analyse any page and this in turn means that it must...