Links to your website is really all what SEO is. get links wherever you can: blogs, directories, buy them, etc

For really general terms, I’m going to say it’s probably your linking strategy.

I’ll give you a golden secret here, but this’ll help you considerably if you take the time & effort to implement it.

Find out who your top competitors are and analyze them. Their on-page optimization efforts, and their linking strategies.

Go to:

http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

And type in the URL of the pages of the top 5 or top 10 and look into your competition’s inbound links – where they’re located on the page, the topical relevance of the site that is linking to your competition and the anchor text used to link to your competition. You can determine if they’re paid links (or somehow incentivized, not just cash money) or if they’re natural.

Now, to break this down and understand their linking strategies, you’ll have to have a good understanding of link building & SEO yourself, but it’s a good way to help you determine a linking strategy that will likely help you achieve your goals if you’ll follow through with it.

This doesn’t work in all cases, and it’s not a perfect plan – but it gives you some very valuable information on your competition & what they’re doing regarding their link building strategies.

If you need any help, I do offer competition research services – it’s not really cheap, but what I do is listed here (albeit in a condensed format).

The single best strategy to rank well under a given term is to become the expert on the content. Write and deliver the best possible information possible that people will want to read and share.

Once you get past the basics such as proper site coding, etc. you’ll want to focus on making your content a must read. This will mean that other sites will want to link to you with very relevant anchor text.

- Get Google Webmasters Tools
- Make sure you’re sites getting indexed and has a site map
- Update the site regularly
- make sure you are getting your articles Dugg, Stumbled Upon, etc.
- get educated on how to ethically rank highly.

Directories are a great way to start building your linking, but you’ll want to do more than that if you want to rank highly for more competitive terms.

The most effective way to advertise on the Internet is
to first set up a website and publish its domain name
on major search directories such as Google.com,
Yahoo.com [at http://www.google.com/addurl/?...... and
MSN.com since 85% of Internet shoppers rely on these
search directories to provide them with goods and
services. In a sense, these search directories are a
very large Internet Yellow Pages.

Nevertheless, should your website or opening webpage
fail to contain "generic" keywords, then anyone using
such "generic" queries will not be able to discover
your website. Your domain name [URL] of your website,
in a sense, will be invisible, undiscoverable.

You may want to consider some simple algorithms which,
when observed and committed in designing of a website
with placement of various critical metatags that can
surely achieve a high search engine presence and
increase Internet traffic to your website. These
metatag strategies work well with published webpages
at Google and Yahoo.

Placement of Metatags:

A ranking or search order does take place with Google
and Yahoo and it begins with the "Title" metag which
should consist of no more than 65 characters separated
by commas. The "Title" should describe in generic
terms, the goods and services, followed by a location
from which the resource is located, i.e., city, state.
The placement of a domain name which is not generic
within the "Title" is not appropriate, unless your
domain name is a major recognizable brand name.

The second metatag is the "Description" which is
usually 25-30 words to form a complete sentence which
best describes one’s goods and services.

And the very last category – "Keywords" are also
somewhat limited to 15-16 words which can be plural
and compound in nature. Again, avoid multiple entries
which could be mistaken as "spamdexed entries" which
is defined as the loading, and submission of
repetitive words into a particular metatag category.
"Spamdexing" when discovered on a webpage and reported
to Google’s spamreport.com can result in the
elimination of your website from their search
directory.

Here’s an example of a very highly-placed website on
Google.com: Begin with the very "generic" search query
"sandwiches downtown los angeles," taking note to not
abbreviate Los Angeles to "LA" and of course, leave
out the parentheses ("). It will bring up some 470,000 search results. Check out where "Nazos.net"
is ranked. It’s ranked No. 1!
Again, Nazos.net’s high web presence was achieved by
proper web design and placement of relevant metatags
according to Google’s publication guidelines.

Good luck!