Any website owner who starts down the path of internet marketing will soon discover how many "guru's" are out there all claiming some secret trick to boost your search engine rankings.The reality of it is there are some key things to pay close attention to, but a lot of success just comes down to hard work and consistency.  Depending on what keywords you want to rank for, you can achieve success in a week or 2 or it may take months of hard work to get any results.

Asisde from basic webpage SEO stuff to make sure everything is done correctly, the biggest single factor still in your rankings is the number of links and where they come from.  The PR(page rank) of the site linking to you is important, as is the content on that site.  Recipricol links used to work really well (you link me, I link you) but now its really downplayed by Google as a valid method of links.

The easiest way to get links is through article marketing.  This is not the least work path, its the easiest as far as results go in my opinion.  The setup is simple:

1. Do some keyword research on your topic.  Pick 2-4 keywords you will focus on.  Make sure they get decent search volume but do not go after stuff that is too generic (meaning it will have unusually large seached volume) - those will be way too hard to rank on in a reasonable time.
2. Plan on writing 10 – 12 articles of 300-400 words each, using 2 of the keywords with links to your site in each article, with no more than 3 links per article total.Use the kwyword itself as your link text, not http://.
3. Publish 4 of the articles on a major article directory that has good ranking such as Ezine Articles or ArticlesBase.  These have human reviewers so it will take a bit of time to get your article published.  Luckily they do not expect it to be the first time its published, so while you are waiting there you can post it elsewhere.
4. Make sure you get some software that helps to spin the article content and links.  Basically spinning allows you to subsitute words and sentences for one another so that you can get a different article from the same basic article.  DO NOT try to use rewriting software – I have seen none that do a decent job – usually it reads like garbage and that will not help your rankings.  If you spin an article right, you can easilly get 10-20 different reading articles from a single article, enough to not worry about duplicate content out there (and possible penalties). 
5. The next step is to mass distribute your articles to sites looking for great content.  You can do this manually for free, or find some tools to purchase that can greatly speed this up.  I usually choose to pay some money in the savings of time.  There are so many things to do, you have to trade off somewhere.  You want to make sure you spread out the distribution – its unnatural for any site to go from no links to 500 links in 1 day – what is more natural is 0 to 10 to 18 to 25 to 40 … over many weeks build the level up.
6. You will need to start tracking your ranking level on the few keywords you have picked out.After you have used article directories to get about 300 links or so you should start to see a boost in rankings.  Some keywords that are not as competitive, much less, and of course, some it might take thousands.  Your goal should be to get on the top 2 pages of Google for your search terms. 
7. In addition to the article work, you can also use social media accounts to link to each of the articles you publish AND also to your main web site.  You should make a hub pages site and a squidoo lens about your site or niche as well with links to the site.

Sites all want fresh content on them to improve their quality score.  Most look to articles about their niche topic to keep the viewer on the site and get better ranking.  This is exactly why article marketing works – you get links on disribution sites, webmasters get to search for content to add to their site from what is published.