It's not all meta tags, I have several sites that have meta tags and don't show up on google even though I've repeatedly registered them to the robot. Google uses links, if you want your site to show up in google in the first place, you need to have other sites linked to you, or else the bot will never find you. However, I don't know how the ranking works after you're in, I have never had the pleasure.

I doubt it's all meta tags though, that seems old technology, anyboy can pop in a few meta tags at the top of the page, I still think it's link count. Because a website can keep the same meta tag and be first on the google search for so long, and then one day, it's second, without changing a thing, think it lost a link?

As for the links, that's how sites like webrings and traffic sites work, too, they link to you, not only so other people can see your website, but it also helps you to get recognised by google, and I'm sure it helps them, too, of course probably in other ways.

Now, I'm not really sure about this link theory, so if I'm completely wrong, please, cut me some slack, but I know at least getting recognised by google in the first place you need other sites linked to yours.

Wow good to know some secrets to get top in the google ranking.!!!
I think than google alexa ranking is good, anyways google is better for top sites.!!
If u want to get google top ranking for your won domain website, then i think u should get good and excellent traffic so that they might put up your website in the top list and on the first page of the search or else the better way to get the good traffic is for trying google adwords, where google places your link on google page searches in the advertisement link, so that the ur website gets good attention to customers and surely ur site will be top ranked in google. Anyways all the best..!@

alot of people are optimising their search engines for yahoo and msn now, as google's off limits to new sites most of the time.

What differences do Yahoo and MSN look for in a site that would place them higher on the search list?

I think there is no such criteria for Yahoo & Msn..if we simply work on the basics then the chances of getting indexed in search engines are good. The only problem which happens in the case of Google is that Google works on PAGE RANK and thus people work hard enough to bring the site up on the top search results, SO may be he was reffering to the techniques used to bring the site up on Google's search results.

pagerank has been well and truly dropped by google's I've got a pr5 site and its not even in the listings for its keywords and the top 20 for those keywords are pr3-4 sites!

I would have to say "content is king" when it comes to googles seo ranking algorithm, obv keywords, meta tags etc still help but without content your visitors wont come back time and time again. up2date content also helps, try adding rss feeds from other sites for instant updated content

Very true. Content is the most important part in the search engines to find that pages and for others to keep coming back to this particular page. If we provide quality content people tend to spend more time there and google search results are being determined that way as well. If a visitor spend much time in that page from the search result, it means that page is useful and it will have a very good or high google pagerank in few weeks too. I have seen that one of the pages inside my website has a higher google pagerank than the homepage itself. This is proof to this.

Let's continue discussing this topic...

its not that msn and yahoo have a strikingly different algo than google, all the SEs pretty much look for the same things. but google is soo slow in adding new websites it's almost criminal! you can be listed at the top of the serps in yahoo and msn for a year before google even puts you in its serps!