There are a lot of articles claiming to tell you how to get to number one in Google.  

Being at the top of Google can bring you many riches and rewards.

Because of the rewards of being number one on Google, every one wants a short cut, and there are hundreds of SEO firms out their that will happily take your money to help you get to the top of Google.

Many of the techniques used by SEO firms in the past have been called ‘black hat’, which means that the techniques they use are tricks that cheat Google, rather than do what Google want and present relevant, current information to the top of the SERPS.

To be number one on Google, they want relevant current information, and here is the proof 

In the last year of so, Google have become cleverer with their algorithms, and updates known as Panda and Penguin have removed  the value of the out dated SEO techniques.

That said, there are still many snake oil salespeople, selling number on on Google, and still peddling out of date techniques to blast you up to number one.   Some still may work, short term, but Google is gradually eliminating the value of these techniques, mainly spam back-linking, so you may get to the top of the SERPS, but it would be short lived.

So there is no magic formulae to be number one on Goolge, or even number one in Google.

Follow the Google webmaster guidelines, create great content for your users and work hard. Alternatively if you need to be at the top, and you don’t have anything interesting to say except your producty, pay for advertising via AdWords, this can be very cost effective compared to the more vague science or witchcraft of SEO.