Hows does Search Engine ranking work?

How does it work? Is it by how many clicks it gets? Is it by how close it is from the meta search? Is it by how many times the word 'x' has appeared on that site? Is it how many visitors that go there? Im currious

If you are talking about Google's PageRank, very rough description of the ranking method is

"You get points if a site links to you(internal link); you give points if you link to some site. Obviously, the higher PageRank the site linking to your site has, the more points you get."

It has nothing to do with meta tag. It has nothing to do with keywords. It has nothing to do with number of visitors to the site. If you want to understand more about PageRank, you probably want to read articles posted at the following sites:

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
http://www.highrankings.com/articles.htm
http://www.websitepublisher.net
http://www.sitepoint.com/

Thanks

Don't forget http://www.seochat.com which is part of the Developer Shed Network

...M

just wanted to add selfpromotion.com too, its really good to get the concepts not only for google, for all of the search engines and lists / indexes on the net, worths to look at

I'd like to add SearchEngineWatch.com as an invaluable source of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) information. This site covers it all .. and even shows you the ranking of the Search Engines from 1st to last.