Actually this is quite possible. I have managed to get to number 2 for a keyword that has 2.5 million competing sites within 8 months and rank very well for a range of other related words.
After studying may
SEO books and reading a lot of work by so called
SEO gurus, I am convinced that the best way forward would bea combination of quality content on the actual website and also quality back links.
This is not that hard to achieve. What I generally do is publish 4-5 articles on Ezine per month and also try and add a good amount of blog posts, that have very good internal linking to a blog hosted on the same site.
I have tried to use Angela's and Paul's link but I do not really find much value in this type of account creation ( for long term benefit anyway). Instead concentrate on forum posting.
The great thing with forum posting is that you also get 'link juice' from the actual post. Also throw in some book marking of the forum posts and the articles
and you should be able to get the ranking you are after.
Tools I use are IBP for checking and analysing mine and my competitors site. I also make use of power article rewriter. Both tools are available on this forum.
Please let me know if I can be of any further help.
John.