What you do to your own website in terms of optimizing it only accounts for about 15% of your success rate in getting top listings with Google. The other 85% comes from off-site optimizing, such as the number and quality of the websites, using "deep links", that are linking back to you. Example, I've seen a website with a PR of 1 get indexed on the the first page of Google with other websites that were PR 4-6, because the website with the PR 1 had a 1,000+ other websites linking to it.

Regards,
Steve