There is no magic in SEO. Google puts the most interesting web sites at the top.
Is your site interesting? Do people actually want to read it? If not, that should be your first step. As Mangetout says, a blog can help, if you update it regularly (say, weekly). I can give a few pointers if you like.
Also, heed the advice above about avoiding shady methods. Ask yourself this: are you optimizing your content, or are you gaming the system? If you’re trying to game the system, it will come back to bite you one day.
Large companies don’t have a problem getting into Wikipedia because they generally do notable things and have plenty of sources pointing to them. I don’t know what size of company you’ve worked for.
But small businesses are rarely going to be able to meet Wikipedia’s notability requirement, and since there’s also a “no promotional materials” rule, there’d be nothing to base a Wiki article on.
One I actually know about personally : truck driving.
You do need a class A drivers license and a clean record, however.
But if you have those 2, and you are willing to work for the bottom of the barrel trucking companies that hire rookies (Werner is one of them), they’ll pretty much offer you a job after a phone call. They’ll even keep hounding you if you change your mind…
You might be a bit confused. Human-readable site maps are indeed pretty old-school-- they’re pretty rare now and not necessary for a quality site.
The site map Google wants is for machine consumption. Basically, instead of having Google guess the layout of your site, you can tell it exactly how your site is laid out, and you can also tell it how often content is likely to change-- for example, a blog index might change daily but a homepage might only change once a month, if you provide Google with that information it’ll index your pages more often.
This also allows Google to list a few extra links to your site when it comes up in the results. For example, if I search for “Ford”, I get:
Ford Focus - CompareFord.com www.compareford.com/
Find Your Nearest Ford Dealer Today & See Focus Offers!
Build & Price - View Current Offers - Locate a Dealer - Search Dealer Inventory
Those links at the bottom – Build & Price, View Current Offers, Locate a Dealer, Search Dealer Inventory – are defined in the website’s site map. If you don’t have a site map, Google can’t place those extra links because it’s not sure exactly how your site is laid-out.
In that specific case, I chose the first result that wasn’t an ad.
Note that Google gives different results to different people based on location, history, A/B testing, etc. So just because I got fordcompare.com as the first result doesn’t mean you necessarily will.