How Search Results Are Ranked
If you want to rank on top for Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines, first, you should know how search results are ranked, what makes a search engine rank a particular site high in its search results and a similar site much lower, and so on.
Each search engine has its distinctive algorithm for ranking the pages in its search index database. In general, they follow the similar methodology; similar factors are important to all the major search engines. To that end, it's instructional to look at how Google, the Web's largest and most popular search engine, ranks its results.
Google, like all the other search engines, attempts to serve its users by ranking the most important or relevant pages listed first and ranking less-relevant
pages lower in the results. How does Google determine which web pages are the best match to a given query?
Step 1: Text Analysis
Google looks not only for matching words on a web page, but also for how those words are used. That means examining font size, usage, proximity, and more than a hundred other factors to help determine relevance. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring pages on the same website to ensure that the selected page is the best match.
Step 2: Links and Link Text
Google then looks at the links (and the text for those links) on the web page, making sure that they link to pages that are relevant to the searcher's query.
Step 3: PageRank
Finally, Google relies on its own proprietary PageRank technology to give an objective measurement of web page importance and popularity. PageRank determines a page's importance by counting the number of other pages that link to that page. The more pages that link to a page, the higher that page's PageRank, and the higher it will appear in the search results.