Building Links to Page One - Stuck at Position 8

Link building strategies to get the highly competitive keywords ranked.

[Redge]

We have been working on this website for over a year now. The main keyword was on 20th page of Google when I started out.
Now 4 months back, we got this Keyword ranked on 1st Page/ 8th Position in Google. But since then doesnt matter how hard we have tried to bring it in top 3 results, its position has not improved. The good news is that the position has not decreased as well. We add articles to the site frequently, link building is also going on. What else can we do (off-page seo or link building) to bring this particular keyword on top. What should be the approach to bring a keyword from 8th Position to 1st in Google.com.
We build around 100 links for this site each month. Do we need to decrease the monthly links? Do we need to build only High PR links using targeted keyword as Anchor text?

Its a well designed E-Commerce website. Around 20,000 pages google shows in result of site:website.com

Please suggest what do you think would be right approach to solve this issue. I've waiting more than 4 months to see it on top. Article marketing and Link building is all off-poage work I've been doing.

[martinibuster]

What kinds of links do the top three have that you don't have?

Are your links diverse? Do you have links from a wide variety of sites?

[Redge]

The TOP 3 sites owns a large no. of sister sites, and they are lnked from all of the pages of those sites. Even the 4th and 5ht sites are very old ones, as well as units of big groups (like Top 3). Other than this very fact, they have not done anything which we haven't. They have links from article dirs, pr dirs, news/media sites (archived pages), and from related sites too. So do we(other than news/media sites)! Our site is ranking on 8th. Over past 4 months we have distributed articles across good dirs, and also have bought links from good old sites, which no other competitors of our niche has, and thats why I thought this would work. But it hasn't so far. Though we are building links for homepage and important deeps pages constantly every month. But dont know why Google is not awarding us for the efforts which we've done in past 4 months. Our domain is also a generic one (compared to the Top 5, which are manipulated to have the keywords in website's url).
What kind of links will work in this type of problem, and how to use "Anchor text". Is that a key?
One more thing - We had booked some extensions of the same domain for security/authority purpose. May be we could provide something in future at those sites. But does anyone know.. If I redirect those to the main website, will there be a change? Have you seen anything of this sort?
What can we do now?

[Planet13]

- We had booked some extensions of the same domain for security/authority purpose. May be we could provide something in future at those sites. But does anyone know.. If I redirect those to the main website, will there be a change?

If I understand correctly, you have something like yourdomain.com, yourdomain.net, yourdomain.co.uk, etc, right?

I believe that google would encourage you to redirect all those to your main domain (i.e., yourdomain.com).

I hope I understood your questions correctly, and apologize if I didn't.

[piatkow]

Of course the other 7 might just have better on page optimisation for the keywords concerned. Links are just one factor out of many in the SERPS.

[SEOsoon]

My opinion about it ...

If you tell us, that you´ve been spending now 4 months of work and that Google doesn´t recognize your efforts, you should consider that 4 months is not so much time.
there are other pages working on SEO for years ... and there is no guarantee to rank on first position.

If you are working on link building you are on the right path! Keep on working on it, try to aquire good and high quality backlinks, diversify your anchor texts by using your main keywords and so on.

What could be useful as well (as you told us, you have a e-commerce website) is start some actions in social networks - you could focus on Twitter and Facebook.
Try to get some LIKES or RETWEETS by your followers and friends ...

Google and Bing just admitted again that "signals from social networks" do matter!
But okay, this would mean to spend some time in posting, being creative and deliver good content.