What All Goes into Ranking #1?

In August 2012 I started a business/website in my niche,


I built about 1500 do-follow/no-follow links from relevant sites (message boards, blog comments, etc). Content on my website is unique only and handwritten by me. In January I found a trustable, non-spammy 3 year old, PR3 domain with about 1500 or so backlinks that was in the same niche as I was. Won the auction and 301'd it to my brand/money site. I was given PR1. After the re-direct finalized I landed on page two for ALL keywords in my meta-description and on-page content. (this was around Feburary).

Bought a few BSTs and I'm #6 for my main keyword (9900 monthly exact) and #7 for my secondary keyword (5400 monthly exact). I've been at those positions since April but have been as high as #4 or #5 at times for each word (but it never lasted more than a few hours or a day). The Penguin 2.0 update boosted me up to #5 for the second keyword and kept me where I was at for the first one, more than anything I'm just glad nothing extreme happened even then I know the indexing shuffle isn't over with.

Competition is pretty fierce in the Top 10, mostly High PR domains that've been there for 2-6 years with thousands of links. The website occupying #1 for one KW was started in 2010 and probably got there around 2012 or so. But It never buldges, not even during data fluctuations. I've been using some pretty solid BSTs here and I managed to crawl up to the positions I'm in now and I was just wondering, what do I do from here?

I've been as high as #4 for both keywords but always dropped back down to 6-7. Do I just keep blasting away High PR links with exact-match anchor text? I haven't done much work with social signals, just always focused on my link profile. My PR is still 1 and my site is still technically less, than a year old. I do add fresh content to my website, but not as often as I should. I probably have about 19-21 articles on my website total.

FYI: I'm not really a SEO person. SEO isn't really my thing. I run a e-commerce business and mainly come here for the BSTs/archives.

As you site is already ranking, Check the other top sites and it's keyword proportions and variations. Make sure to create backlinks to more variety of keywords with long tail keywords.

once you get more backlinks for other keywords, the long tail will give more traffic. At that time, increase the social signals and add few more quality backlinks to money keyword. Hopefully It will climb.

If you are buying services you should have a talk with linksmaster. He is one of the guys who has done solid work on one of my sites and gotten great results.

Maybe a very hard niche... Sometimes is better to find a new and easier niche to rank(I am finding some lately) because if your competition is too strong you will need a lot of job and it may not be worth the effort.

I am not telling you to give up that keywords or pages, otherwise creating a new small project or 2.

Thanks for the replies, will take time to go through them shortly. Would appreciate more input though.

Simple things like better on page optimisation, adding privacy and terms and site map. Better hosting helps. Make sure it's in the same country and it's fast and your site is well optimised serving content as fast as it possibly can. This is a major factor lots of people overlook.

Then I'd look at site structure. Page structure. Adding a blog if you haven't got one. Added main keywords as actual pages in the main menu helps too.

I'd love to take a look and provide feedback.

PM me.