What do I need to do?

[Johnathan]

Hey, What do I need to do to get my site in the first page or two without having to pay for stuff? So the keywords at the top of my page, and what else?

[dflynn]

the best thing is a good domain name to go with keywords. on top of that the content and links.

Google's bots search content relative to searches and Domain and Keywords are key parts of theyre searching. If I search "Dinosaurs" Dinosaurs.com will most likely come up first.
And the more "popular links" you have on your pages the better. It's kind of like Popular people because they have popular friends.

[Johnathan]

So like if I had a link to some big time site I would get better ratings in search engines, right?

[dflynn]

in theory yes

[Johnathan]

So could I just get a big list of popular sites and make it a tiny font and the same colour as my background to get high ratings? In theory of course.

[dflynn]

Google seems to have a work around for people like that. First it expects these big name sites to also be linked to your site, also if it notices a lot of links to popular sites it begins to ignore them.

The best thing is solid content.
Also allowing things like Digg and such is said to help.

[Johnathan]

Digg?

[dflynn]

http://www.digg.com/

There are a lot of things like this and many websites have a series of links like this after each article or whatever.

[psv]

I believe that having keywords or links in the same colour as the background is something that could actully lead you to being de-indexed from the search engines.

Google has quite a lot of information on what is seen as good for the search engines here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522

Out bound links don't hold any value to your site, it is the inbound links that you aquire from other websites that will help your google ranking. The more important the website the higher the value will be, it is beneficial to get links from sites with similar content to yours no matter the size of the site http://www.google.com/technology

Try and get as much textural content as possible onto your site, and input keywords for the meta tags, titles etc. H1 tags for page titles and make sure the coding you have on site is clean so the search engine bots will be able to read it easily.

Good luck with this, it will be an ongoing process if you are aiming for the top

[apg1985]

Thats wrong having a link from his site to a big site will do nothing, you need a backlink from a big time site (well a site with a high PR) to his. bots index the big sites first then travel down the links, thats why having a backlink from .gov sites help massively.

Your best bet is to do a search for blogs which are in the same category as your site and leave a backlink in the comments section.

Check social bookmarking as well.

O and the idea of small links or same colour as your background is black hat seo and will get you knocked off the engines, check out white hat seo.