There's tons of factors that are involved in Google's ranking algorithm. Age of the site is an important factor. Traffic to the site is also important, as are keyword density (number of times a word is used on a page as a percentage of all words on the page), meta description tags, <h1> and <h2> tags, title tags, links from other websites to the page (very important), alternate text for images, relevance of the page topic to the rest of the site, size of the page (Kilobytes)...I think you get the idea.
Nobody I know has found the secret combination that gets good rankings. I've seen old low-traffic sites with no inbound links outrank newer sites with incredible traffic and thousands of links, and vice versa.
If someone actually knew with certainty what it took to get to the top in Google, he or she would be a multi-millionaire. Maybe even a billionaire.
Here's an example. Back in 2001 I did a website for a friend's gun store. I got it to the #3 spot on Google for the phrase "Kimber pistols." In nearly nine years it hasn't moved from that spot while the other sites above it come and go. Their site hasn't changed in years, and there's almost no links to it. The only thing it has going for it is age. The #2 spot has changed often.
It's a constant battle to even stay on the first page, and requires getting more links to the page, adding content to make the page "fresh," etc. By every measure that I've read about, the Shooters Shop shouldn't be at #3, but it is. Go figure.
