Google uses a PageRank system for the central basis of its indexer. It gives a higher priority to site linkage. There are also other complex factors that go into the ranking system.
Attempting to manipulate Google used to be nearly impossible. However, the advent of Link programs and Link Schemes has made it possible to drive up your rankings. The more links you can generate on the net, the better off you will be (well duh).
Google is not using any type of context sensitive rankings that we can determine. The only context style information is coming from listings in the ODP, Looksmart, Yahoo, and About.com directories. Google spiders those sites regularly and reindexes its own database accordingly.
Your best bet is to follow a good search engine promotion system. Here are some generic approaches to Google based on our testing and educated guessing that may help your sites visibility on Google. Testing was limited to submitting sites resulting in 100pages of inclusion into the Google database and studying which pages ranked highest under plum targeted keywords.
Highest ranking: domain based. ie: search for mp3 turns up www.mp3.com. Appears whois domain information may be being used. The frequency of INC in the top ten results is no accident. We feel they are using Whois data now to influence results. (sept 1, 2000).
Page Linkage. Read their info on Page Rank. Highly informative and good reading for the search engine addict.
Title. As always, it is important, but it doesn't appear to hold the weight that other search engines give it. GOVT, EDU, COM, NET seems to be the order of relevancy with some foreign domains ranking higher than their American .com mirror counterpart.
Although, .gov's and .edu's are starting to take a nose dive in Google due to the effects of Page Rank (.edu's and .gov's have historically had low linkage numbers). Reciprocal Linkage text. (text of a link pointing to your site). Keyword text within headings. h1...h6 Bold faced words or large font words. Page size : smaller is better. Stay away from dynamic page extentions (.asp, shtml, shtm, jsp...etc). Density is not a major factor. In testing, keyword density has been all over the map from 20% to even 0%, yes zero (its that links thing again).
Tips
Submit any referring links (best links first) to Google. (links pointing at your site). Dig for good recip links on the net. Recip linkage is extremely important to Google.
Join a link pyrimd program to build links. Yes I still recomend this. Don't fall into the trap of searching for your keyword and trying to clone pages, tags, or descriptions of other sites that rank high - it just don't work with Google.
Use keywords in headings and bold type. Put up walls between (like Excite) major topic areas (try not to link back to your base page from a subsite) otherwise the spider will crawl the whole site and lump it together.
Use ABSOLUTE url references in all your pages. Google caches those pages, and when it serves up the page out of its cache, the only way some of those images are going to get loaded is if you have absolute references.
Google is was based at Stanford University until its move in 1999 to its own .com domain. It appears Google is going the way of the standard staple search engine. It is now the main search engine behind Netscapes NetCenter and Yahoo. There are also many foriegn domains and languages indexed.
