Stuck on second page SERPs - site won't budge

[htdawg]

my page is 3 levels down on my site
www.example.com/folder/folder/page.html

it used to be in the top ten for my main phrase (competitive kw) but slowly slipped to 2nd page over the past 1 1/2 years. I have tried tweaking the title & description, then added more text in the content & increased keyword density, reduced ky density, removed internal links all of these changes were made one after the other in order to see what works and some combination's of the above. there was no noticeable difference in ranking just a few spots up & down.

now the top ten results for my main keyword show 8 domains with atleast one word of my main kw phrase the other two listings are deep pages from huge sites.

is there some kind of -10 penalty or does google think my page is not good enough to return to 1st page?

also would a old domain that has pr3 but has not been used for a site only pointed to a page on a site but until recently has been developed into a site (3 months old now) take atleast 8-12 months to start ranking for its main kw phrase which is also the domain name?



thanks

[tedster]

It sounds like your site is attracting backlinks slower than your competition.

[htdawg]

would you say that quality backlinks are one of the factors play an important part in ranking for new/old sites?

[tedster]

Absolutely - for the pure strength of those "votes", and for anchor text, and as an indicator of trust. If an assortment of pages are essentially equivalent in their relevance to a query, then backlinks will make all the difference for ranking.