A very important step in rising to the top of the Search Engines, is to have a good link building campaign. Links to your site benefit you in a couple ways.
Find Quality - The better the link to you site, the greater the impact to your ranking. The reverse of that can work also. If you get a lot of links from bad sites, it can impact you negatively.
Deep Linking- Get the links to the page you want to improve the ranking. If you have a product on your site, get the link to point directly to that, along with the search term being the link text.
Take Your Time - If the search engine sees a site go from 3 links to 3000 links overnight, the engines may think that something is up. Spread it out over time and you will benefit.
There are many ways to get links to your site, and you need to get a campaign going early on.