Wordpress Templates and Ranking

Hi,

Im having a bigger site where im trying to rank one of my pages for a term. I have been building backlinks and working pretty hard. Im number 4 now and my biggest competitor on number 1 have pretty much the same setup as i have with wordpress and about same content on the page.

I have been checking his backlinks on yahoo to that page fora few weeks now and i can only find 8 backlinks. I few social bookmarks and few others. I have the exact same backlinks as he do plus many more. My main site is PR4 and his is PR3.

The only difference and the only reason why he ranks number 1 as i can see is that his wordpress template is a bit special. This "page" looks just like his main site, same template but his sidebars are totally empty and the whole page is named keyword.

Sorry for rambling so much but i guess my question is how can you do this? Have he installed a second blog with a new SQL database? Or can you handle it somehow else? Since my page has links to all my other pages i guess im leaking power? Any other reason why he outranks me?

I have been getting good results in ranking by using an ezinearticle with my keyword in the title and spread out in the article. Write a few articles like that or outsource the writing then get them into ezinearticles site ONLY, don't put them anywhere else, not even on your site. This works. You can also do a few yahoo answers using your keyword in the answer link.
Hope this helps

I'm not an expert but if he's listed in yahoo directory, If your the keyword is in the title, header, description and url, the age of the domain and how often you update your site with new content are all factors. This is kind of obvious and sorry if you already knew all that I said.

Yah the only difference as I can see it is the template. Either that or he have some backlinks that are not updated on yahoo yet.