Nobody knows. The formula for ranking pages at google is one of their best kept secrets. So, I'd like to preempt that everything I speculate here are just my uneducated guessings. I have to be careful, because I'm not supposed to hack the Google formula and I certainly won't even try that. By doing that I would be risking the cb ranking to be reset to zero, like it happened with WordPress.org recently for a different serious reason. Therefore I hope that this topic stays within the boundaries of a Sunday afternoon informal discussion and won't go into technical details.

You have a great web site. You have great content. You update frequently. Still, you don't have traffic. Why? There can be many reasons, but search engine ranking is one of the most important factors. For most web sites, a big percentage of the external traffic comes from search engines, nowadays mostly Google. Many of the visitors who become regular readers are finding sites through search engines, rather than referrals from other sites or personal connections. The higher your site shows among the search engine results, the more chance you have for people to click on your link and get to know your great site. So what to do to have high google ranking?

Follow Google recommendation

Google provides a very detailed documentation as to how webmasters should optimize their sites for Google. Read it!

Make good content

Good content gets linked from other sites. Links are votes. Whenever a web page links to you, your site gets vote points in the Google system. However, at Google not every site has an equal vote value. A higher ranking site linking you gives you more vote points.

This is the system a certain church that I don't want to name (and especially not link) tried to exploit by creating literally hundreds of fake sites interlinking each other to bump up the ranking of their main site. Obviously, it was a short lived attempt. Google perfected the algorithm to avoid such hacks.

By asking every friend of yours to link to you can definitely get your page rank higher. If you can manage to get a major site to link to you it would be a big boost. Don't expect your rank go up in a minute. It takes months.

Blog on blogger

Abdul is following closely his google hits and Jim suggested that Google may be giving advantage to Blogger users in their ranking since Blogger is owned by Google, therefore they would give preference to their own blogging services over any other blogging engine.

I definitely agree with this theory, based on the experience with creativebits. The number of hits we received from google while it was hosted with blogger was in the area of several hundreds daily. Now, we are running the same site with the same content and apparently the same Google ranking, still we receive a much lower number of hits from searches. I don't know what the reason is, but the only thing different is the engine behind the blog.

Make money with adsense

One way to encourage Google to rank your site higher and make sure you receive more clicks is to make sure google benefits from your site. How? Include a Google Adsense ad on your site. There is a reason the Google ranking formula is kept secret. I don't think Google wants us to pick apart their policies as how different pages are ranked. And I have to stress they have all the right to do that.

<script type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> </script>

If I was Google I would not only check who has a Google ad, I would also make sure to give priority to sites who make the most money with the Google ads. The more money the site owners make the more money Google makes. Does this mean big fat ads indirecly contribute to your pagerank?

Use all Google services

There is a very cool service from Google, which enables you to provide a search engine for your readers on your site through Google. These search results will include the same sponsored ads as regular Google search result pages. You get payed for the ads, Google gets his share. Same concept goes for Adlinks. If the theory was true your ranking would rise further. Conclusion is use as many Google technologies as possible. Amazon gives you more than a percent off if you use their A9 toolbar. It makes sense Google plays nice with his partners as well.

Self inflicted clicking

Another theory is that since Google is interested in giving you the most relevant clicks they can deliver to their users, they want to know which ones really are the relevant ones. The best thing to go about it is letting the users decide what's relevant. Based on the small blurb that appear under search results users can judge what is relevant for them most of the time. Therefore if Google would record the number of clicks per keyword search a certain site gets they could rank the top links higher, so that the search results users get are more and more relevant and precise.

I don't recommend, but I heard some found a way to cheat the system by clicking their own links for some keywords from different IP addresses. It would register as different users are being interested in their sites for those specific keywords. All this for a slight increase in pageranking.

Update your site frequently

Google wants to bring relevant results. In this world of everchanging everything, information dates quickly. My post about how to convert your screenshots to jpegs from pdf, with the arrival of Tiger became obsolete. I don't know if there is a way to determine an html creation date, but if there is it would make sense to give priority to newer content.

There is a whole science about search engine optimization and some people actually do this as profession. Go read on Wiki about what those guys called SEOs are doing to please their customers.