What factors come to play to be at the top of search engine?

[Brandon]

I have a website that I am trying to optimize. For web search engines like google or bing, what do they look for that determines your website to be at the top of the list instead or somewhere like the tenth page. Really just looking to be on the first page for my profession in my city.
Also I heard reciprocal links don't matter anymore, is this true?

[Jake]

There are cases like a hammer site linking to a nail site where Reciprocal links are acceptable, they can be easily detected, having a page full of link exchanges with unrelated sites can actually cause a penalty in ranking.
Search ranking is always for a specific term, typically you would have a target list of keywords you would incorporate in original content when suitable, and on occasionally include in the anchor text in links from other sites. Having original quality text content is important, providing a library of helpful articles on your subject is typical, links from other sites are judged as popularity votes, their value varies greatly, depending often on how easy they are to get, you can get 1000 robot generated spam links for a few dollars that may actually do more harm than good, a few quality links might be enough for a local business to rank, things line a chamber of commerce link, a link from a local university group that you sponsor can be gold.
Ranking on Google Places local listing can be very important, having citations from various directory sites and votes from Google users may help the ranking, the ranking of your business sites seems to influence the Places Page ranking as well.

[michel]

The title tag or meta title is the text that appears at the top of your browser window. Think of it as the title for the webpage. The meta title is also what is displayed as a link in search results.