There are hundreds of factors that help search engines decide how to rank a website. In general those hundreds of factors can be broken into two categories – relevance and popularity. Further within the category of popularity. There are two primary types, domain name popularity and page popularity.

To rank #1 for a given search you need to have the highest amount of total popularity on the Internet for that search term.

If you look for patterns in the search result pages you will see this. Have you ever noticed a popular domain name like Wikipedia tends to rank for everything?

This is because they have enormous amounts of domain name popularity. What about those competitors who out rank you for a specific term with a practically unknown domain name? This happens when they have an excess of page popularity.

And just because the page is a page rank of 5 does not mean it will outrank all pages with a page rank of 4. You have to keep in mind that major search engines do not want you to reverse engineer their algorithms. As such, publicly releasing a definite metric for ranking would be crazy from a business perspective.

In my opinion, hyperlinks are the most important factor when it comes to ranking webpages. This is a result of them being difficult to manipulate. Modern search engines look at link profiles and use those relationships to determine rank. The take away for is that the time spent earning links is time well spent. The same way that a rising tide raises all ships, popular domain names raise all pages. Likewise, popular pages raise the given domain name.