How does google rank your website? Googles keyword search tool

How Google Ranks Pages

Google is recognised as being the most popular and most important search engine on the internet today. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that hundreds of thousands of webmasters are constantly looking for ways to improve their search engine rankings on Google. So how does Google rank your site?

Introduction

Google uses two main factors in determining your web site’s rank on their search engine. These are On-page ranking factors (these you can control by making changes to your web pages), and PageRankâ„¢.

On-page Ranking Factors

These are things that are controlled by you like the title tag, heading tags, link text, body content, alt tags and more. Optimising these parts of your web site and more means that Google can crawl through your content and pick out exactly what you want it to. The trick is knowing how to optimise your pages just the right amount for Google

PageRank

PageRank is Google’s method of measuring a page’s “importance.” When the On-page factors such as Title tag etc are taken into account, Google uses PageRank to adjust results so that sites that are deemed more “important” will move up in the results page of a user’s search accordingly. Sites gain more PageRank by having quality links to them. Quality links are links from other related sites whose Pagerank is good.

The Google theory goes that if Page A links to Page B, then Page A is saying that Page B is an important page. PageRank also factors in the importance of the links pointing to a page. If a page has important links pointing to it, then its links to other pages also become important.

Basic Google Ranking Overview

1. Find all pages matching the keywords of the search.
2. Rank accordingly using “On-page factors” such as title and page content.
3. Calculate in the inbound link anchor text.
4. Adjust the results by PageRank scores.

In order to to find out what people are searching for use the keyword search tool found here  https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

For more information on googles methods see http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

A great site with table of ranking factors http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/internet/google-ranking-factors.htm