I was trying to explain to my boss how Google calculates its results for certain search engines. Now before everyone starts emailing me saying "Its a secret, you don´t know!", I know that but you can get a good idea of how it works with some research and testing for a few months.
Anyway, I came up with quite a good analogy that might help other people trying to get a better idea of how it works. So here goes. Think of a single webpage as an individual person. The most important part of the page from a Google point of view is the page title and the H1 text. Now think of these at that persons opinion of themselves.
With me so far? Next. Now think of Google´s results as what the general population thinks about certain search terms. It can be thought that a single person´s opinion doesn´t carry much weight with the general population and this is why you can´t create a single webpage and expect it to get to the top of Google. Bur what about other peoples opinions? If everyone agrees with your opinion and expresses it then the general population will believe that this is the case. This is where other webpages come in.
You can think of every other webpage as an individual person as well. Now their opinion of another person can be thought of as the text that makes up a link to another webpage (link text). So to get at the top of Google for a certain search phrase you need a lot of opinions that match your own. In essence, match your H1 and title tags and then get links on as many websites as possible with the same term in the text. Simple!
Well, it´s not exactly that simple since you have to take in to account Google´s PR of the pages in question as well as a host of other variables, but it gives you a place to start from…
I'm a web developer based in the East Midlands, UK and if I keep up the current rate, I might have developed 3 million sites by the time I retire