Forget the alchemy surrounding Google ranking algorithms. Achieving high ranking in Google is actually simple. The secrets are actually lying on the simplicity of the techniques.

Here are how to achieve high ranking in Google search engine result pages:

1. Write quality content (d-uh!) on regular basis, preferably those that bait for backlinks, and promote your content to as many people as you can – Digg it, Stumble it, Mixx it, etc.
2. Write lots of articles and submit them (along with your link on the ‘resource box’) to top article directories like Ezinearticles.com and ArticlesBase.com (spoiler: Your unique article on EzineArticles.com vs. the copy of it on ArticlesBase.com: The copy could rank higher than the original!)
3. Do occasional link exchanges with quality, related sites – be careful, do this excessively can backfire. 3-way (Site A to Site B to Site C) or 4-way link exchange is even better.
4. Occasionally link out to related, authority sites – dofollow the links (yes – having dofollow outbound links on your sites is actually beneficial.)
5. Nofollow affiliate links – better yet, cloak the links, preferably with your domain name hosted link cloaking – e.g. YourSite.com/Afflinks
6. Earn your backlink: Do guest posting on other, high quality blogs; do blog commenting, forum commenting, and any other kind of commenting that enable you to have links back – preferably dofollow – to your target site.
7. Get quality – authority if possible – backlinks; even buy links – no matter how Google Team try to convince you that buying and selling links are against TOS, big businesses do it all the time, sparingly.
8. Do on-site or on-content SEO; fill your content with highly related keywords, while limiting target keyword’s density – e.g. if your target keyword is “cheap hotel rooms”, your article should contains related keywords, such as “affordable hotel room,” “cheap hotel,” “cheap hotel room rates,” “budget hotel” etc.
9. Directory submission – despite the fact that web directories are no longer effective as link building tools, the quality ones (a.k.a. those that have high Google PageRank and which pages are indexed quickly by Google Bots) are still delivering results.
10. Join link building clubs – such clubs are usually private and invitation-only (or require you to pay for membership;) you can work as a team to build each other sites by strategically linking out to certain sites in certain ways to achieve maximum impact on search engines.

Of course, doing is harder that the theories. You can’t hire someone to guarantee you high ranking or such, either (it’s against Google and other search engines’ TOS, anyway.)

Ranking high requires you to invest in either money or time – sometimes both – on regular basis. You need to spend lots of time if you want to go frugal in link building. In trade, you can pay SEO specialists to do link building for you, spending from tens to thousands of dollars a month to rank better in search engines.