Sites Not Ranking for there search term

Guys i have a number of sites that all have unique content on them but hav found this problem time and time again that none of them are ranking for there term, ok i have one site that only has two backlinks, its index but ranks at 165 in g for one of my post, advice on what should i do, build more backlinks or forget the site and move on?

Get more backlinks! why should you forget it, as it sounds like you haven't even put any seo work into it yet.

It depends on the competition for the keywords you are trying to rank for. Some keywords are going to be close to impossible to hit page 1 for. What you should be focusing on is ranking for long tail keywords related to your main keywords. For example, if your site is about cars, you'll never hit the frontpage without a very expensive SEO campaign. But, you could rank the pages of your site for keywords like, "best cars of 2010" or "How to get approved for a car loan"... things like that. Use a keyword tool like the adwords keyword tool to spot low competition long tail keywords. They may be getting less search traffic individually, but it has been proven that collectively, you can receive better results targeting long tail keywords. Don't forget your site as your likely to keep running into this problem time and time again. The fact that your site IS ranked, albeit at 165, means that if you target long tail keywords you may see some success.

Cheers for you replys, these sites were when i first started about 5 months ago and thought about more backlinks and i have been targetsing the long tail, so its time to get on with the link building.