Here is a quote from Dave Taylor regarding "Relevance Score" (Dave Taylor is a lecturer with "Stompernet"): Site reference:
Tech Support Questions? Ask Dave Taylor!
QUOTE :
Position on the search results page is based on what I call your Relevance Score, a formula that's calculated by Google's search engine to figure out in quantified terms how relevant your Web page is to the given search term and how authoritative your site is overall (to break ties). Note that this is different, and pretty much unrelated to your PageRank, though most
SEO people are pretty obsessed with their
PR scores, unnecessarily so in my opinion.
Given the existence of Relevance Scoring, it's clear that if you knew exactly what formula Google used, you could create Web pages that were perfect matches, with the right words in the right places, the right ratio of key words to non-keywords, the right HTML tags, etc. Then, though you couldn't guarantee the #1 spot, you could certainly move to the front of the pack, far ahead of sites that aren't paying attention to what Google's looking for.
The sad news is that no-one outside of Google knows how they calculate Relevance Scores (even if they say otherwise) so we're left guessing and experimenting. And that's where things get a bit dicey...
END QUOTE:
"Relevance score" takes into account many factors... A few which may or may not include:
Relevant keywords, Relevant keyword density, Relevant title tags, Relevant description, Relevant H1 key words and phrases, Relevant bold key words and phrases, Relevant italic key words and phrases, Relevant keywords and phrases used in site wide links, Relevant websites linked to and from, Relevant keywords in both inbound and outbound links...
Relevance may also be calculated by; the amount of time a visitor spends at a website, what the visitor does at the website, where the visitor goes after visiting the website, the country of origin of website and browser, the name of the domain, the name of the page, and many, many other factors come into the "so called' relevance equation....
Some of the worlds top
SEO's claim that for every piece of the algorithm puzzle that webmasters manage to "please Google algorithms" with they get a "point" in their "relevance score".
So... theoretically...
It would be possible to outrank "Coke" for the search term "coke"...
(although... in my opinion... it would be stupid to try...)