Does where you place in a Google search ultimately come down to how often Google crawls your website?

[Focused Life]

For the "macro" search (as opposed to local search/maps) I have found that the biggest contributing factor nowadays is still backlinks, but now there is a huge push favoring "social curation."

This is all kind of the 80/20 rule that I am talking about here so please do not think that this answer is by any means the end all say all ultimate authority when it comes to backlinks. What I am talking about gives you the bulk of the SEO boost benefits that most people are looking for.

So, to further explain....you should still be getting backlinks from any source you can find and obviously the more relevant the better, however, with the advent of social media - Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus as well as Review sites it is more important than ever to allow for interactive engagement when it comes to your content.

Whenever you can get folks to talk about your site or a post you made, etc, and the more people engaged in that discussion, the more the search engines seem to place some heavy weight to that discussion.

Social Engagement coupled with backlinks is simply huge in my honest opinion. Simply do a search for "blog curation" or "social media curation" to find tons of info out there about this.