Google purposely keeps this a closely guarded secret and there are hundreds of different criteria that are measured. The best thing you can do is read the google webmaster guidelines and build a site people love. Over time you will find something worthwhile. In the words of Larry Page: "Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing that people don’t get.â€
There are 2 important things that matter in increasing your rank: 1. Building backlinks 2. Unique Content
After the latest panda theory introduced by google in the last update, CONTENT is gonna play an important part in building the rankings of any site. Remember you make sure, everytime you post an article, it is not copied from anywhere and is unique (without any spelling mistakes, ofcourse). Then start creating accounts in all the high rated social bookmarking sites given in the addthis widget. Then bookmark your articles after every 24 hours of posting your article to all those networking sites. Also remember to do cross bookmarking to get more views and votes for your bookmarks.
This single liner statement contains a lot of insight!, really feel glad to read it & appreciate you sharing over here to the OP: to rank good in Google or any other search engine you need to optimize your site pages (both onpage & offpage) you can submit unique articles to sites like EZA, articlebase etc... (they give you a backlink along with loads of traffic) In this era of social networking where almost everyone is using sites like facebook, twitter - you can also take advantage of these social networking sites to draw some good number of hits to your site... there are numerous ways to get traffic & to rank high in Google, you just need to start from some point or the other and then keep increasing your efforts as the time passes by
Yeah yeah yeah... Backlinks backlinks backlinks... How about some advice on how to get backlinks and what backlinks to avoid?
Backlinks might have counted before February 2011 but not since then and the change to Google's algorithm. What you need is original, well written (including correct spellings, grammar and an extensive vocabulary) content. Waffle is penalised, duplicate content is not ranked and 300 words is the minimum requirement. All you have to do is put yourself in Google's place. Do they want a pile of plop on page 1 of their SERPS? If that is what google searches produce then people will use different methods and that is exactly what Google needs to avoid. Any idiot can backlink but they can't write well. Therefore, in answer to the original thread post's question, to get to the top of Google SERPS, employ a writer not an SEO expert...
Write an attractive articles which will attract websites to link about it and also do it everything naturally and constantly.