In order to gain rankings in any search engine, your site needs to be relevant to the topic that you are targeting.  Call me Captain Obvious. 

However, you'd be surprised at the number of sites that we come across where the keywords (exact or related) are not present on the site in question.  Or perhaps they are relying on a very graphically-oriented or flash-based site but with no textual content that can be effectively indexed by the search engines.  These guys are in the right ballpark, but they are no where near the field of play. 

Naturally, one of the main activities we work on for these sites is to add real and relevant content that can help the search engines place their site into a topical context.  Most of the time this content has already been written but has not yet been placed online.  Perhaps its in press releases, brochures, testimonials from clients etc.   This is part of the optimisation process called "on page" optimisation.

Search Engines learned long ago that they cannot solely trust the content on a website to accurately represent it; they place a large amount of emphasis on how other websites represent your site.  This may be in the form of links from partner websites, clients, or perhaps from PR activities such as articles and magazines.  All of these inbound links are used to help categorise an individual page and entire site. 

As you can imagine, if your site is getting links from other sites that have no dominant contextual theme then it will be difficult for the search engines to place you into a specific category.  Furthermore, you will also have problems if all of the sites that link to your web site are in a completely different industry or niche than what you are targeting.  Remember - the search engines place a bit more trust on the views of other sites, especially topical authority sites, than they do on what you say about yourself.

So the tip here is that as you continue to develop and market your website, make sure that your on-page content is consistent and "on topic" and make sure that you build your "off site" reputation with other relevant sites that could be considered to be part of your online "topical community".   As personalisation in search becomes more prevalent, this concept of community will have an increasingly important role to play in your on-going search engine optimisation.

To help you better understand which sites will be relevant to you, we have a free tool that will help evaluate if a site is relevant or not called our Site Relevance Test.