Good article, care of Andy Beal, in the Washington Post on what it takes to get ranked highly in Google thesedays.  One way to rank well - write  material "relevant" to your keyword phases  and getting lots of links to the page from elsewhere on the Web.

According to Rand Fishkin, who runs SEOMoz, It’s "very hard" to game Google today, particularly since it keeps improving its link analysis: "Recently Google has been getting more smart about this and can even detect and devalue paid links,"  

Another person has a slightly different approach

Bill Leake, chief executive of Apogee-Search.com, a consultancy firm in Austin, said links are still the key to impressing Google. He advises businesses to take a two-step approach to boosting their Google rank. First, they should test search terms related to their business by purchasing Google ads for those words, which allows precise tracking of ad click-throughs and purchases. After learning which search words yield the best results on ads, businesses can hire a consultant to embed those terms into their sites and buy links relating to them.