Yes, it's absolutely true! The "trick" is building a quality site that deserves to be in the top 10. Your quality site will be a place that humans want to visit and will naturally attract other sites to link to it.

Other people may give you advice about how to cheat the system temporarily with black hat things that will eventually get you banned from the search engines. But I'm sure your brother didn't have that in mind!

Oh, and welcome to Webmaster World! Here you will find tons of advice for how to build your quality site.

Sure enough, if you want to create a successful site that people will want to come back to again and again, the trick is nothing more than good hard work and due diligence on your part. Getting into the top 10 took me a while, and I had the advantage of starting with a site that was already in the index. Back then I knew little more about a website than some basic markup tags.

These days, my 'tricks' go into the development and enhancement of my pages. I don't do anything SEO-wise that isn't discussed in this forum as good practice.

Good Luck

It depends what you want.
It's easier to get into the top 10 if you don't worry how long you want to stay there.
If you want to stay there for longer, expect it to take longer to get there.

I have a friend who works in a home office doing work that involves Oracle and big business computer systems and stuff. I work from an office at home, doing work with websites and SEO and stuff.

We pick up our kids from the same school and waiting at the gate it is assumed we must have lots to talk about because, you know, we basically do the same thing. But we don't. I have little or no understanding of what she does, she is completely baffled by what I do. The other mothers are baffled by both jobs, so we do have that in common!

Your brother's friend likely read an article a few years back which he half understood and took from it that it was really just a matter of knowing some formula and up you went to the top of the pile. And to be honest there was a time when that was kinda true. But no more.

You got lucky though. You just learned that there is no secret formula before you went down the road of trickery and made yourself a big mess. And you landed in the best place there is to learn whatever there is to know about online marketing.

Read, read, read. The library, see link at the top of the page, is the best place to start. Be skeptical about everything you read though, even here.

Here's the secret to getting in the top 10:

[webmasterworld.com...]

This is a classic post by the fellow who runs this site.