How Google Ranks Pages

A page's rank is the position a web page has in a search engines results page (also known as SERP) for a given search term. So if you were to type "SEO" in the Google search box, you will get those results (standard - 10 per page) that Google deems most relevant to your search SEO, sorted by their degree of importance.

The most important and relevant web pages are displayed in descending order.

For the Google engine, the relevance of a web page depends on the tight bond there exists between the search term used and the content of a page. On the other hand, the importance of a page depends on the quality and quantity of links from other sites linking to it.

If your website does not show up in the top 20 results for the keywords most relevant to your website's content, chances are you won't be getting much traffic from search engines.

Because a large number of people never go past the first 10 results page, your best chances of getting traffic from search engines would be to position your website in the top 10.

Nobody knows for sure how much traffic a number 1 position gets compared to say a number 4 or 10. Those above the fold of a page (positions 1, 2, 3 and maybe 4 - depending on the monitor used and the resolution) will receive more clicks than those for which you have to scroll the mouse wheel to get to.

A recent study shows a relation between a website's rank and the percentage of clicks received by that site.

On the first page of a SERP the results are as follows:
Position 1: 30%
Position 2: 15%
Position 3: 7%
Position 4: 5%
Position 5: 4%
Position 6: 4%
Position 7: 2%
Position 8: 2%
Position 9: 3%
Position 10: 5%

On the second page of a SERP:
First position: 6%
The second position: 4%
The third position: 2%
Fourth and etc: <1%.

As you can see, if you do not rank in the first two pages, your chances of receiving traffic from search engines are pretty slim. When was the last time you did a Google search and you got past the 3rd result page without changing the search term?

To appear in Google's index, Google needs to visit your website using automated software called robots or spiders. Such programs "read" every page your webite has, starting from the first page, following every link on your site. When such a bot visits your website, this action is called "crawling".

Bear in mind that Google will add a web page to it's index only if there is another web page in it's index which links to it. Crawls are made by Google's main spider, called Googlebot. Depending on your website's popularity, the frequency of these visits can increase over time.

To appear in Google search database (index), Google visits your site using automated programs called robots (robots) or spiders. Such programs "read" every page of your site, starting from the first page, followed by all links on your site. When a search engine bot visits your site, this action is called crawling.

Bear in mind that Google will add a web page index, or unless you already have another index page has a link to that page. Useless add your site to Google, unless you have a link from another website to your website. Websites with a high rank that update their content on a daily basis (news sites or blogs) usually get crawled every day.

Google updates it's index almost continuously, but major changes are made several times a year. These major changes are correlated with changes in the rank algorithm.