My friend has just had a website built for her business and it has after about 3 weeks just appeared on Google on about the seventh page of that particular category, however there are always the same websites featured at the top of the page that are highlighted which I presume are ''paid for'' so my questions are how does she go about buying one of these paid for slots (as I have tried looking but can find nothing on the subject) And also how much does it cost?
Without using adwords, she will have to get lots of links back to her site from other sites, use lots of words that are related to the search subject and become popular by other people visiting.
The last one is tricky because you need to attract lots of visitors but how do you do that without already been ranked high?
The paid for stuff is clearly marked as adverts on the Gogle search result page.
Position in the main bulk of resutls is down to referrals to your site and popularity etc. You have to find Google's criteria and try to match it as best you can. There are advice pages out there on the Web. Try Googling for them :)