Ranking in the Search Engines:What does that Mean ?

Ranking is a websites actual placement or position on the free (unpaid) listings section of a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase. It is meaningless to speak of website rank without specifying what search word or phrase you are ranked on. When someone says to you My website is #1 on Google, you need to ask OK, but for which search term? Your ranking on Google is dependent on a number of different factors' like:

PageRank: Googles patented system for specifying a web pages importance, which is but a single, albeit important, factor that determines rank. Many people confuse a pages rank (what position they are on a search results page) with a pages PageRank (PR) value. They are totally separate. Because of the confusion around PageRank, it will be discussed in detail later on.
Keywords: Keywords for those words and phrases that best define what a web page is all about, and are found in a variety of places on web pages. When someone enters a search term or phrase into Google, Google tries to find those web pages whose keywords match the search phrase the best. This is an oversimplification here, but you should get the idea. Some people confuse keywords with the META Keywords tag. They are not the same thing. The days of filling up the META Keywords tag with as many terms as possible are over. Google, along with most other search engines today, ignore META tags as they have been so abused.
Page title: The title of a web page is the text contained between the tags at the top of an HTML file and is displayed in the top bar of a browser window. It is not the first heading of a web page or any other large text that may be displayed at the top of a web page. This is an important distinction to know.

The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order in the major search engines. For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page matches a specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other web pages (particularly from web pages on websites other than your own). The concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter. If your site does not appear in the top 30 for your most important category or subject, you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search result, you really need to be in the top 10.

It can be debated how much more traffic a #1 gets compared to say, a #3 or a #10 ranking. Studies indicate that those listings above the fold on a results page (which means anything higher than a #4 or #3 depending on your monitor size, resolution, and other factors) do better than those below the fold as a certain percentage of people do not scroll. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you have to start scrolling.

To be listed in Googles database (or index), Google visits your site using automated programs called robots or spiders. Such programs read each and every page of your website, starting typically with your home page and then following each link to all other web pages on your site. When a search engine robot or spider visits your site, it is said to crawl or spider your site.

Important: Google will not add a web page to its index unless there is at least one other web page in its index that links to one of your web pages. So do not submit your site to Google directly. Rather, you need to get another website to link to your website first.