Despite being the biggest web company in the world and hiring thousands of the most intelligent, skilled people on the planet, Google Search is still only a robot and therefore can't read an article and tell the difference between good writing and bad writing.
Luckily, it has ways of making an informed decision about what quality content is and which pages should make it to the top of search results.
Imagine the internet is an enormous library which contains trillions of pieces of written content. These could be complete encyclopedias through to throwaway post-it notes about what people had for breakfast. Everything is thrown into a large pile and Google, as the librarian, is meant to index every piece of content so that library users can easily find the information they want.
Your latest article about the good work your organisation does has just been written and has been added to the large pile. How does Google know where to index your article and how prominent to make it in that index?
It uses two evaluation methods
Relevance
Does your article contain lots of keywords related to the topic you're writing about?
If you're writing an academic paper about the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, it's assumed you will be referring to them throughout the document. You'll also be using other words related to swallows and velocity. Google has an inbuild thesaurus, so it knows which words and phrases are related. The more you use these words the more relevant Google considers your article to the topic and will grant your article more priority accordingly.
Importance
Is your article referred to in other documents?
If your academic paper about swallows has been referred to in scientific journals and in other academic papers, it will be considered more important than other, similar papers which haven't been quoted.
Furthermore, Google considers the importance of these other sources when deciding how important your own paper is likely to be. For example, a citation in Nature will be worth more than a mention in Hello magazine, particularly in relation to swallows.
A simple equation to remember when writing your content is therefore
relevance + importance = rank
Consider how everything you write is relevant to the topic you're writing about, and how it will be of interest to the reader. Also, consider who is likely to be interested in linking to your article.
Remember, Google ranks your pages based on how useful they are to real people, so don't try to cheat the system using black hat techniques to get better rankings. When Google change their clever algorithms it's likely those tricks will stop working, your page rank will drop and your pages might even get de-listed or banned from Google altogether.
As Google's own quality guidelines state:
"Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines".
Next: Step 1: Plan