What follows is an email I sent to a friend hopefully helping him to better understand how Google’s Page Rank system works, and how he can get his website on the first page of Google search resluts:

I’m glad that the Google stats for your site are looking up.  There is one thing that I tried to explain to you on the phone before Christmas that I don’t think I explained very well.  Let me try explaining Google Page Rank again:

Q1. What determines which websites are put on the 1st page of Google search results?

• The relevancy of the title and text on your web page to the search query.
• The number and quality of other people’s websites linking to your website.  You can think of other websites linking to your site as a vote… The more votes your site has, the higher your websites ranking will be.
• The best way to influence your page rank is to make sure you have good key words in the title of your page, the URL, and in the text on your page.  The other thing is to encourage quality websites to link to your site… These are the key things in your control (more info from Google).

Q2. What else can you do to monitor your website and find ways to improve it?

• Update you  website with current relevant content.
• Get a Gmail account so that you can access other Google resources to help your website.  
  http://gmail.com
  
• You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site is viewed by Google, so you can modify it to make it more “Googlefriendly”.
• Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from geographically, and what other sites are forwarding users to your site.

I hope this helps!