You are likely receive many replies on the different ways they can get your site to the top ranks. I'm not in this category of experts but I can share with you what I've read from the many SEO forums on what can affect the ranking of a website. There are a few school of thoughts on successful SEO, so I'm not biased to any one of them.
Sponsored Listings
These are the websites who paid monies to the search engines to get themselves listed at the top of the search results for a specific target keyword or key phrases. These websites will always be seen at the top of the first page search results. This is one sure way of getting your website at the top of the search results, and can be an expensive way too.
Rich Content with good SEO
Some contend that when your website is rich in content, search engines would be delighted to visit your site, assess its relevance and list them on their search results tied to relevant keywords or key phrases. The more original content on the website, the better the chances of a good rank.
Link Popularity
Some contend that having more links pointing to your website would also enhance the ranking of your website. However, whether it would appear at the first page of the search results would also depend on how many competing websites there are for your target set of keyword or key phrases. This is why many of those who believes in link popularity are very active in link exchanges.
My own website has a Google Page Rank of 4, which is quite average for a small site. I use professional tools like
Wordtracker for choosing good keywords, and
Webposition Gold for auto-submission of my web pages. You're welcomed to read about the other tools I use at
http://discovervalue.com/web_promotion and decide for yourself what works.
As for me, I'm getting about 70000 visitor sessions a month, and an average sales revenue of US$300-400 a month.