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Primary Ranking Factors:

There is a lot of speculation, and many myths about what factors Google uses in their Page Ranking Algorithm. If you can address the primary factors, you are well on your way to increasing your site's visibility in Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

1. Title Tag
<title>Ranking well with Google</title> This meta tag is used to identify what the web page is all about. Make sure to include your primary keywords in this tag; don't abuse this tag by stuffing it with multiple instances of your keyword (keyword stuffing).

2. Keyword Useage
Make sure that your web page contains unique content about your primary keywords, written in a natural manner, without trying to maintain a target keyword density. You can test keyword density at www. keyworddensity.com.

3. Internal Linking Structure
Make sure your internal navigation is easy to "crawl", and that the most important pages in your site have a link from your index page, as well as some of the primary categories. Use relevant keywords in the anchor text. The search engines are trying to determine what your page is really all about. Help them out.

4. Page Content
Make sure that each web page contains content that is relevant to your site's main theme, and unique as well. Write it with your "Users" in mind, not the search engines. Find out what they are looking for, and then give it to them. If you have a site about Losing Weight, don't expect a page about Car Engines to do well. It's not relevant. Also, duplicate content is discounted by all the search engines, so don't even think about stealing another site's content.

5. Inbound Links from External Websites
This is actually what made Goggle unique in the beginning. They thought that the more people linked to a particular website, the higher quality the site was. If the inbound links contained keywords, then the site was especially relevant to the search term.
From Page and Brin - Google founders "The Anatomy of a Search Engine": "..anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves" and "...counting citations or backlinks to a given page....gives some approximation of a page's importance or quality."

6. Outbound Links to External Websites
Make sure to include relevant links, referring to other websites in your web pages. While you may lose a few disinterested visitors, the search engines will see your site as a good source of information for your keywords.

7. "User Friendly" Design
Make sure your website is designed with "Users" in mind. Make it easy for them to identify what your site is about and where to click. Give them multiple paths through your site, and almost unlimited access to information. If your "Users" love your site, so will Goggle There is an army of users with Google toolbars installed, and if one of them visits your site, they will feed Google the information on how long they were on your site, and where they went.

8. Technical Considerations
Make sure your server is always available. If it's down when Googlebot visits, you will not get indexed. If, for some reason, you must use Flash, make sure to include some static navigation links somewhere. If you use dynamically generated webpages, avoid using session id's.

Like more information on Google friendly design, visit Wikipedia or Google's Guidelines for Webmasters