How Achieved Top Search Engine Rankings

Having a lot of content and links won't do you much good if your site is a mess. One of your first steps should be to ensure your website has been thoroughly and properly optimized. This should include the following:
        Meta, title and description tags
        Internal navigation structure
        Keyword list to page map
        Content optimization - headers, keyword density
        Title or Alt tags for images
        Image filenames
        Robots.txt file
        Clean, Validated XHTML/CSS code

    Inbound links. 

inbound links pointing to pages in your site is a key method search engines like Google use to determine your site's importance. Think of links as a popularity contest. When respected sites link to your site, the more popular search engines think it is. Link building campaigns are very effective when combined with on site optimization.

    Content.

You can't expect to rank well if your site doesn't have content about the term(s) being searched, and duplicate content copied from other sources doesn't count. Original, structured and useful content about your product or service is required, and more is always better. There's no such thing as too much unique content.  When done properly you increase the chance of garnering supplemental results where you get two listings in a row where the second listing is indented.