A search ranking is also known as “organic ranking” or “natural ranking.” It’s the rank of a web site in a search engine’s index of sites, organized by key word or phrase. Typically the goal of a site is to appear within the top ten listed results for a given key word or phrase because this is the first page of results. For instance, the NY Times site’s goal would be to appear in the top ten results when people search for the phrase “new york newspaper” on Google.com.
You can affect your ranking, by optimizing your site and its content.