In a nutshell, they care about giving visitors the best search results possible. This ensures people keep using Google and makes Google wealthy.

But how does Google determine which sites have quality information and which sites don’t?

While Google’s algorithm is constantly being refined there are a few things that stay pretty consistent.

Thanks to the Google Toolbar, Google Analytics, and Google AdSense they are able to track visitors’ behavior on almost every website on the Internet.

They track how long the average visitor stays on a given website. The longer a visitor stays, the better the content must be.

They track how many pages the average visitor visits before leaving. Again, the more pages the better unless the visitor went to many pages in a very short amount of time. This would indicate that the visitor couldn’t find what they were looking for or the content didn’t capture the visitor’s interest.

Google also tracks bounces. A bounce is where a visitor leaves a site after visiting only 1 page.

Too many bounces are harmful to site’s rank in Google. Google records your IP address when you visit a site and therefore can tell when you return to the site. Google keeps close tabs on return visitors. Return visitors are a major indicator that the site has useful and relevant content that is most likely updated regularly.

Some of the sites with the biggest number of return visitors are news related sites like digg.com, cnn.com, or social sites like facebook.com, myspace.com, etc.

Google also favors site’s that have information added to them on a continuing basis.

People have known this for a while and in some cases have tried to keep their website updated regularly by putting up content that was copied from another site. In response to this Google has developed a duplicate content filter which does a pretty good job at determining if content is unique or if it was copied from another site. If content has been copied to several sites Google can usually determine which first site first posted the content and will frequently ignore the sites that copied the content.

So the morale of the story is this: If you want to rank high in Google and get traffic then make a site that has useful information not copied from somewhere else. Give people a reason to stay at your site and look around. Give people a reason to come back. In short, provide visitors with something of value. The more value you provide, the higher you rank.

The first way to get indexed by the search engines is to write a short, 500 word article about the topic covered by your website. This shouldn’t take more than 15-60 minutes.

Once you have written your article you simply submit it to various article submission directories. Some popular article submission sites are:

http://ezinearticles.com

http://articlecity.com

Search engines crawl these sites everyday and will see your article with the link to your website. You’ll be indexed in no time.

Method 2

The simplest way to get your site indexed quickly are to buy a link from someone with a high PageRank. I suggest taking a look at:

http://www.linkmarket.net/

Method 3

The third tactic to get indexed quickly by search engines is quite simple and costs nothing.

The tactic is to use the various home page services offered by Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

When you signup to have your own free home page with Google for instance, you can add to that home page a list of favorite links, a lot like your bookmarks list.

And you can bet Google will pay close attention to those links on your home page. By adding them to your list you are essentially telling Google that these sites are valuable to you and worth visiting. This is all Google needs to know and they will go index that page in a jiff.

Putting a link to your site on the personal home pages provided by MSN and Yahoo will work in a similar fashion.

…I am of course, talking about being on page #1 on Google.

It’s also very hard for many search terms, due to the inability to know what factors will propel you to such a lucrative position.

However, even though we don’t know Google’s complex code for how it decides to rank pages in its listings, we do know enough to find our own way there by using some tried and tested techniques, all thanks to the growth of Web 2.0, advanced keyword tools and some timeless SEO principles that cannot be denied by any search engine…

Step 1 – Make your site shine first

Your website needs to be easy to navigate, easy to read and interact with and of course have some quality, unique content. There’s plenty of ways to create websites on the fly these days and in terms of ease of use I would recommend using a Word Press blog installed on your domain to make the site good looking, easy to navigate and of course search engine friendly.

Step 2 – Add quality content

This is what the web is all about and you’ll find that the most valuable and worthwhile content will always find its way to the top of the search engines for relevant terms all on its’ own. People will naturally link to your site, plus the more content you add, the more chances you’ll have of being found on hundreds of different keyword searches.

Step 3. Target some good keywords

When creating content, target specific keywords that you want to be found for. The more competitive keywords may be hard to rank for at first (whilst your site is still new and has no authority) but you can get found for less competitive keywords with a little effort. You should include the keywords in your page title, opening paragraphs and throughout the entire page. You might want to include the keyword in the Meta descriptions too, although there’s less evidence that this actually makes a difference these days.

Step 4. Keyword rich back links

This is the biggie in terms of getting ranked well, especially for your chosen keyword phrases.

There’s a difference between getting some simple links back to your home page, and having other authority sites linking back to your page using proper keyword rich anchor text to specific pages on your site.

Ultimately, don’t fall for the hype about SEO and overnight rankings. The reality is, the most stable rankings will take time to appear but once they are there, you can expect a lot of traffic and sales as a result.

SEO is just one part of getting traffic to your site you’ll be pleased to know that there is a wealth of other lesser talked about strategies to get sheer amounts of traffic in a few days or weeks, which lasts for a very long time to come.