Google gives you credit for many things including the amount of time your website has been live and registered to one person, the amount of quality back links that are pointing to your website, and the quality of your content as well as many other statistics.

When potential clients come to me and say I want to be on the first place of Google for certain keywords, I tell them there is no guarantee that you are going to land in the top listings for the keywords you have chosen.

However you are more likely to place on the first page with keywords that have less competition than words that have massive amounts of competitive pages that are indexed.

For example; If you a small site that has been around for a couple of years and you want to place for words related to Orlando hotels. If you target the keyword Orlando Hotels, you are competing against large sites like Travelocity, Orbitz, and Expedia. Your chances of getting on the home page with these gorilla websites is slim to none. So try targeting words like orlando v acation hotel, orlando lodging, and so on.

You need to establish quality back links, have great content that highlights the keywords you are targeting, and know what your customers are searching for.

Do the research on your competition and see what they are placing for. Look through WordTracker, and see if the keywords get the traffic you would need, look at your monthly reports and make adjustments when necessary.

If you have limited time and money, then write a to do list for seo and follow it. Say you have a couple hours a week to optimize your site. Spend half an hour adjusting page content, half an hour doing research, half an hour submitting to a directory, and a half an hour, posting to blogs.

The more time you have to devote to your seo campaign the sooner you will see your website move up in the search engines.

Most importantly, never give up. Some website owners have put blood, sweet, and tears into getting the great placement for the top searched keywords in their industry. Many large companies have several people doing seo on their sites at the same time. The more energy and knowledge you invest, the better your placement will become over time.