Only a few people know, and they all work at Google.  The best anyone can do is guess based on their own success stories.  Here are some of the tactics that are known to help (you can find a more exhaustive list in many of the SEO books out there, although with Google's most recent Caffeine update in late October, 2009, some tactics such as hyphens in the domain name are no longer as beneficial as they once were):

• Content Optimization: don’t create content for Google, create content for visitors and optimize that content for Google based on keywords.
• Keyword Ratio: for every one hundred words, three to every five should be the keyword you are optimizing your site for.
• HTML title tags: If you forget these, then your site will be lost in the sea of searches.
• Link Equity: the number of one-way links pointing to your site, the better.  However, web sites that have related themes will provide more points than sites that do not.  In fact, sites that are not thematically linked will only provide a small benefit.
• Don’t use flash: sure it looks cool, and search engines can now read it, but only having one page of content to look at is quite boring to search engines and will lose your site some much needed points.  However, if you can only do flash on your web site, there are some SEO workarounds for flash that can provide much needed help for your site.  Send us an email for details.

This is just a small sample of the many things you can do to increase your site in the results, but we’ve made sure to list the top things above in case you don’t have the budget to invest in SEO due to the recession and want to try it yourself.  However, if you do have a budget, but don’t have the time, feel free to give us a call at (800) 266-5294 and make an appointment with our receptionist to learn how we can help grow your business through our professional SEO services for Google and flash web sites.