How does google determine the order of websites in a search result?

[brisray]

Google uses somewhere between 30 and 200 criteria (depending on which website you read) for determining how a page is ranked for any particular search.

One of the most important is the number and quality of links to your site from other sites. If sites that themselves have good page rankings have links to your site then it increases the likelihood of your site being ranked higher. If those links come from a link farm (sites that contain hardly anything else but links) then your ranking may actually be lowered.

Google's algorithm also takes into account things like how relevant your page is to the search phrase. Google's algorithm tries to determine if your page contains just a passing reference to the search phrase or has something important to say about it.

The algorithm even takes how long your page takes to load into account - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...nking.html

One of the comments on that page is "It would be nice if Google would add more transparency" but when search engines were first introduced (10 years or more ago) who knew what you would get when you used a search engine? How they worked depended on the honesty of the web authors when creating the keyword metatags, which are still used by some search engines, but they were so abused that Google for one doesn't use them any more - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...a-tag.html

There are ways of optimizing your site for search engines (SEO). Google has an article about this http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin...swer=35291 which is as good a place as any to start.