Confused by google rankings

I'm very new at SEO, so please forgive me if the answer to this question is very obvious. But I looked for a keyword on Google. Then I went to TrafficTravis (which is very addicting) and noticed that the second ranked website has more backlinks and is older than the first ranked website. So I was wondering why. Does the first ranked one have better quality backlinks? If you owned the second site, how would you outrank the first one?

There are a ton of factors that go into ranking. Quantity of backlinks is one. Quality of backlinks is another. Domain age, also important to a certain extent.

On page SEO (title tags, meta tags, headings, content) are also important.

It's a combination of all of these, and many others that make up the reason of why a site is ranking in a specific position. Hope that helps.

I appreciate your answer! Is there any way to improve the second websites ranking?

Just improve on factors suggested by "englandrm" and second site could go up in ranking.

I`d also recommend to download a software like Market Samurai. You can find a link on this board.