In order to rank you need websites to link to you.  It doesn’t matter how great your content is.  If no one links to you your great content will never get exposed.  How do you find websites to link to you?  Simple - just reverse engineer the backlinks of your competition. 

To reverse engineer the backlinks just do a backlink search for the top 10 ranking sites using Yahoo Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.   Yahoo gives more information than a Google backlink search.  Make sure when you use Y! Site Explorer to use the drop downs to select show inlinks “except from this domain”.  This will remove your competition pages from the results.  Which is good since I doubt your competition is willing to link to you.

Yahoo will report up to 1000 links per site.  The reason why I like to do this for 10 sites is that I will find alot of backlinks that I will not be able to recreate but if you can recreate 15% of the backlinks from each site of the 10 sites you will end up with 150% of links which is almost always enough to take the top spots.

Common Backlink Types

Articles - News articles and press releases with backlinks in them.  You can recreate this by submitting your own press releases.

Scraper Sites - This is when you see adsense on the top and down below a  list of links.  If you look closer you will notice it is just the serps.  Just ignore these and move on.

Link Exchange Directories - These are typically reciprocal link exchanges.  Many sites do so many reciprocal links that they need a directory to categorize them.  These can be a good source of links from related quality sites. 

Paid Links - These are links that are listed as a “advertiser” or “sponsored link”.  The best paid links are the private deals that can be customized.  Search engines try to devalue the link juice in the large paid link networks.