If you are the owner of a website then you will probably know that the best way to get traffic to your site is to get it to rank well in Google for a search term that gets lots of daily searches. This is no easy feat however; many people all over the world are trying to do just that for just about every search term that people enter into search engines.

So how do we get a site to the top? Well we dont know absolutely everything because the Google developers keep a lot of it secret so as to avoid anyone getting to the top for anything, however, from many years of trial and error as well as a very informative blog from Matt Cutts, Googles unofficial spokesperson, we can get a pretty good idea of what works and what doesnt.

There are over 100 on-page factors to take into account when designing your web pages to ensure that the search engines know what to rank them for, and these include the page title, repetition of keywords in the main page content (but obviously not to the point of keyword spam), alt text behind images, META tags etc. however there are far too many to cover in one article.

Backlinks are of course where the long-term challenge lies. These are links that point to your site and each link carries a certain amount of link juice depending on the value of the page the link is on and it is basically a matter of whoever has the most combined link juice from all of their backlinks will be first for a given search term.

How much link juice a link has is indicated by the Google PR of the page that the backlink is from. This is a number from zero to ten and is an indication of how much value Google places upon a given page and how much juice a link from that page will carry. So obviously the higher the PR of a page, the more valuable a link from that page will be and the more valuable links you get, the higher up the search engine results you will appear.