What Am I Doing Wrong?

Hi,I'm currently trying to rank a post on one of my niche sites #1 for a 10k+ searches a month keyword with not that much competition. The site that currently ranks #1 for the keyword I'm targeting has only a few not that great backlinks for the actual article that ranks #1, however the site itself is over 6 years old and has tons of backlinks to the root domain. My post, atm, is ranking #4 on Google for the keyword, although I have created over 10 top quality backlinks. By "top quality backlinks" I mean that I have contextual backlinks from other sites in my niche, and some of the backlinks are from extremely reputable sites. Also, I have a few (both do-follow and no-follow) backlinks from different forums all from the same niche. Some of the articles I've contextual backlinks from have a lot Facebook likes, Facebook shares, G+ recommendations and that kind of stuff (all legitimate), however, I haven't bothered myself with building backlinks for my backlinks. Is that the reason why I'm still not rankings #1 for the keyword? Any ideas what I should do differently? I've spent a lot of time on this and I would have expected better results by now. I don't want to do anything risky either. It's an evergreen keyword and while I'd like to rank #1 for it today, it is more important for me that my site will rank #1 for the keyword for years to come.Also, as I do not want to "risk it", I haven't used keyword rich anchor text that often. I think I only have 1-2 backlinks that exactly match my keyword, a few partial matches, but most anchor texts are either only one word from the search phrase or totally unrelevant things like "article" the name of my website and so on. Maybe I should use keyword rich anchor texts more often?

Hi,

Is you on-page is good enough? Please check the on page work of your above 3 competitors and compare them with yours, If your's is not as good as others then you will get the idea that what changes are needed in your site.

Well, I'd say it's better. Maybe it's too good? Over-optimized?

One of the sites that ranks above me is Yahoo fr**king answers.

Also, my root domain itself is not that powerful. It's only a bit over a year old and pagerank 2.