where you pop up, say in a google search?

not sure if this is the right forum, im new here, but id appreciate the help=)

Anyone that really knows the answer to this question would be a rich rich person.

Most of the current SEO to determine your listing is a mixture of rich content on your site and quality inbound links. Both of these you can work on and improve your current ranking.

It's important to find the most frequently used methods of search engine ranking and to build up accordingly as no search engine will ever tell you precisely how their algorithms are set up.
Overall it’s the website’s contents that actually determine how well you’re going to perform in a search engine rankings.

thanks for the input guys

Agreed, content plays a very important role.

In terms of google, high page rank and the number of sites linking to you is also very important.

talkfreelance is correct... if you are talking about Google specifically... Links to your site mean a lot.

For example...

Wine Site A has 500 referring links.

Wine Site B has 250 referring links.

Google will (my experience) display Wine Site A above B, purely for the # of referring links.

I do not necessarilly agree to this since you could be on top of the SERPS without having to have more backlinks.