Google are determined that they only have the most relevant sites appearing at the top of their results. For that reason they keep information on how they rank sites secret. This stops those people that want to cheat the system from being able to do it. It also stops their competitors from getting in on the action.

However how secret exactly are Google's ranking policies? Google already releases a lot of information on linking policies and recommendations that are extremely helpful. Following this advice can help you to put together an extremely effective SEO campaign.

There is also no shortage of commentary for Google on advice that they would give to Webmasters, and this should be looked for and used to your advantage. The most recent comments came from Maile Ohye where as expected he said that the most important factors in ranking are content and linking. Below is a quote from the man himself:

"One of the strongest ranking factors is my site's content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources -- however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking."

"Given the user's query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site's content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user."

"As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service."

Maile Ohye also gave the following information on the best way to create unique and interesting content for your website:

1. Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you're passionate about your site's topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.

2. Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.

3. Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.

4. Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they're more likely to link to you.

Creating great content is one of the best ways to get your site ranked highly in Google, not only because you will have a lot for Google to index but also because other sites will automatically link to you.

Remember that you should also provide links out of your site to relevant interesting sites. This should be done in order to improve your user experience and not just to get a return link. In fact link exchanges are not a good thing to participate in as Google can now detect them. They will not harm your site but will probably not count towards your ranking and so are completely pointless. However if you do have outbound links it is important to check them on a regular basis as it is not unknown for sites to go out of business and to be replaced with spam sites. The last thing you want is to be linking to spam sites and so harming your reputation.

Also try to stay away from paid links. They will end up costing you a lot of money and will probably be disregarded by Google. Recently Google has made a big effort to ignore links from paid directories and even to not rank those directories in meaningful positions. Their attitude is that just because you have more money you should not rank higher.

You will also need to consider your internal linking as Google will look at these links as well and use them in the ranking process. Make your navigation simple using text links with anchor text that includes your keywords. This will enable Google to list all of your pages as well as know what they are about and how they relate to other pages.

As a final comment, don't put all your efforts into raising your PageRank, this is not the most important thing. You will often find that the number one site for certain keywords has a lower PageRank than sites below it. The reason for this is that a lot of emphasis is put on the Anchor text in each of your links. So focus on getting good quality links with relevant anchor text and you will soon rise up the rankings.