Website Ranking Factors

This strategy has something to do with the so called Google Sandbox, or the aging factor. Google Sandbox is a set of filters applied to new websites which keeps them from ranking high for competitive keywords for a period of 6 - 24 months. This is also referred to as aging delay.

New websites are allowed to have a good ranking for unique keywords or unique keyword phrases (like company name) and that's about it. For all these reasons, new websites should be made public as soon as possible to start the "aging clock".

Note:
It is very important that your website is up when Google pays a visit to it by following a link from another website. If the site is not made public, your ranking in Google's index might disappear until the next update.
The reason this usually happens is that Google is under the impression that your website no longer exists and removes it from its index after several attempts to locate it.

Google uses a sophisticated algorithm (kept secret, of course) to give the rank of a site that uses more than 100 different criteria in the calculations necessary for the rank, giving a certain weight to each criterion, which may change over time.

Since the algorithm can change, using various techniques that have worked in the past, might not work as well in the present. This is important to remember when the rank of your website changes for no apparent reason.

For these reasons, optimizing your site should not be considered a one time task which you never have to do again. You have to try, to test and refine your efforts constantly.

Google's algorithm can be divided into two groups of factors:

On-page factors (keyword / keywords):
Keyword factors involve when, how and where keywords are used, meaning how well you optimize your site for your most important keywords relevant to your content, and if your keywords appear in the content and links you use on your website.
These factors determine page relevance.

Off-page factors (links):
These factors include the amount and quality of links that send to your site.
Off-page factors determine page importance and are correlated with PageRank (PR). Links play a major role in getting some sites rank high, especially in niches with high competition.
Simply put, Google finds pages in its index that are both relevant and important for searches made on a given keyword and lists them in descending order.