Sitting on the first page of Google search results is one of the ultimate goals of webmasters and bloggers.  However, understanding how to get there isn't an easy task.  Google keeps it's analysis of determining a site's status pretty hush, hush.  However, I did come across an article on Google that may shed some light on the subject.


This article states, "one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis."  The article goes on to state, "today we’re continually crawling the web ensuring that you can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after they’re posted."

With further research I have discovered that pagerank is only one of the 100 factors Google uses to determine search result position.  Pagerank is determined based on the number of sites that link to your blog.  Additionally, the quality of the sites linking to your blog also matters.  If you only have three or four sites linking to your blog, then your pagerank is going to be low.  However, some advisers state that we shouldn't get too hung up soley on pagerank.

We should continue our link building strategies but we should also concentrate on having a site that meets with Google basic requirements which is to provide results that are rich, unique, relevant and offer a good user experience.

Basically, the best way to get to the top of Google is to provide great SEO content, frequent posts and continue building quality incoming links.