Let's find out what matters the most to get ranked higher

One challenge of many web-pages is to rank higher in the search results.
In this thread I would like to ask you, what was the turning point for your website to start ranking higher. So, the question goes to people that brought their web-page in the first page of the search results (i.e. google search) and they want to share how they achieved that.

My suggestion is that we do this in a structured way, so we can have a quantitative analysis on the answers. Then I can come back with a follow-up post presenting the results.

To be precise, I suggest that you add the following information as part of your answers:

• website type: i.e. sports, news, fashion, e-shop, ...
• turning point: what was (in your opinion) the most important technique/move/configuration/event, that brought your page in the first page of google
• achievement time: the age of the page when it started showing up consistently in the first page of search results.
• page technology: i.e. word-press, SPA, custom php, ...
  

Example:

• website type: Fashion
• turning point: Appeared in an article of a big newspaper
• achievement time: 11 months
• page technology: Angular

Feel free to share your stories, but please in the end of your answer add the 4 bullets mentioned above. Also try to use as much precise numbers as possible, for example write "100 users" instead of "got some good amount of users".