There is always an air of mystery that surrounds how google ranks pages and exactly why sites appear on the first search page. Or at least, that’s how is seems. The techies at google labs keep their ranking algorithms a closely guarded secret. It all helps to fuel the mystery.

So we don’t know the algorithm they use, but we do know what is important to google and other search engines. And we can use this to make sure our web pages stand a fighting chance of being ranked well for each of our keywords.

• Keyword position - google gives more weight to words and phrases appearing in the page title (ie, the title tag, <title>), headings and sub-headings (<h1>, <h2, <h3>) and within the first paragraph.
• Link popularity - each link inbound to your web page is a vote for your site. The more links into your page, the higher your page rank. A popular site like youtube has a very high ranking and 85,000 inbound links.
• Link quality - it’s better to get one link from a trusted site, highly ranked, then 10 links from low ranking sites. Google will also give the link more weight if the site linking to yours is on the same topic
• Link text - if your web page is about horse racing, and the link to your site contains the text ‘horse racing’, google will give your webpage a higher ranking
• Relevent URL - and if your site is all about ipods, and in your domain name is the word ‘ipod’, this will also help your site to rank well.

In a nutshell, google likes to see your URL, titles, headings and text to be on the same topic and it likes to see plenty of trusted, ‘authority’ sites, on the same topic as your site, linking to your site.

It gives you a lot more credibility and satisfies google searchers with website content that is not just relevent, but exactly what they were looking for.