Ask most search engine optimization (SEO) experts and they'll tell you that Google is hardly transparent when it comes to how it decides where to rank your website in its search engine for a given keyword or key phrase. But they'll also likely tell you that, despite its secrecy, Google has left clues.

Indeed, not too long ago, Google gave out some of its clues when explaining the three principles underlying Google's technology. These principles related to understanding its users, understanding search queries, and understanding web pages.

Indeed, the main aim of Google's search engine is supposedly to list results based on what information searchers truly want. In turn, Google's technology is aimed at understanding users' intent - not just what they seem to want based on a simplistic interpretation of their search queries.

To this end, Google's search technology takes into account the searcher's location, and also offers personalization technologies to enable a user to generate search engine results pages (SERP's) based on their web history, as well as cross language information retrieval to deliver translations of SERP's not in the user's native language.

When it comes to search queries, Google seeks to clarify and understand exactly what these are by offering such tools as alternate spelling, synonyms, and concept analysis of the search terms.

Google's goal in relation to understanding webpages, meanwhile, is to determine the salient concepts conveyed by the content, as well as to distinguish between the more and less important words on the page, and also take into account, for example, the freshness of the information on the page.

Okay, so Google's search engine aims to understand users, search queries and webpages. But does any of this really tell us anything new? Well, Google has certainly reinforced the notion that its primary goal is to deliver relevant results. But, these revelations hardly explain how and why Google's algorithms produce the particular order of results on its SERP's.

Without knowing the true concepts behind Google's ranking technology, we are still left with these and the other clues Google has left - most notably the clues left by doing applying certain optimization techniques and seeing the results. Still, the overall message is loud and clear: just as Google aims to deliver results based on what search engine users are truly looking for, so too does it behoove Internet marketers to target keywords based on a high degree of relevance between their website content and such keyword queries.