What does it take to get ranked well in search engines? If 2 sites were equal why does one get the coveted top spot and the other second fiddle?

Text is what gets crawled

Period

Not pretty pictures, not fancy flash, not pleasing aesthetics, but plain Jane text.

Be verbose and you'll rank higher in Google and the other search engines than a similar site (all other things being equal) that is less verbose. Being verbose can be as important as onsite search engine optimization techniques.

How did I come to this conclusion?

Article Marketing, Google that phrase.

Article marketing tactics are offsite search engine optimization tactics. I've tested article marketing and compared the increase in ranking with other forms of promotion. If you write an article and are lucky enough to get said article accepted in a high page rank, high traffic, trusted (by Google) authority article directory... You will CRUSH a site that does not have those powerful backlinks pointing to it.

I'm of the opinion that a new site should NOT be written for human consumption unless and until it ranks where you want to be found in the serps.

I'll decode the tech terms:

SERPS: In the SEO industry it means Search Engine Results Pages

Backlinks: Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links. (source: wikipedia)

Cached: A cache is used to speed up certain computer operations by temporarily placing data, or a copy of it, in a location where it can be accessed more rapidly than normal.

Below are some oversimplifications that I'll add for the purposes of illustrating seo techniques for non techies. The precise number of days it takes Google to crawl is actually a closely guarded Google company secret.

Google Trustfilter: that means the Google spider (aka Googlebot) has come around two or more rotations of the earth. During the first pass "you purport your site is about X", googlebot will not take your word for that, it has to look to see for itself

The second pass... Googlebot see's that you still have the right combination of content and keywords and so far you've not done anything untoward like hidden text, keyword stuffing, getting trash inbound links from sleazy link farms. Googlebot sees that your site is indeed about X.

Now you've passed the Google trustfilter.
Do that one more time and if your competitor's website has not matched you, you'll get cached and will no longer have to prove you belong there... The other guy will have to prove he belongs in second place behind you.

Search Engine Ranking is a competitive war of attrition: one side adds blogs, the opposing side counters, one side adds incoming links from online photo albums, the other side counters by matching that tactic as well; one side adds incoming links from article directories... the other side falters or is asleep at the wheel... and you win!