Getting top rankings for popular one word search terms

Terms that are medium to high competition

[Automotive site]

This may sound an odd question to ask, but how do you start ranking for relatively popular single word search terms rather than long tail?

I quite often read here people should not buy links, but without serious backlink power, how does one catch up establish sites for those really high traffic one word search terms that Google refers to as medium to high competition? And I am not talking about a brand new site, it has 3/4 year age.

I do know the very high importance of created superb content that people link naturally to so you get a good amount of links to the site, but some of the more established sites may have 30K, 40K, 50K links pointing to their site. After all, backlinks still carry the most weight in terms of ranking a site. I think its fair to say that.

[gerrigale]

As a new website developer, I find when you are starting, if you write a good blog with links and good keyword density, you have a good shot at ranking with the big guys, other than that I am at a loss here.

[piatkow]

OK, in terms of link building which is what you are asking about, you need to have those terms as anchor text on incoming links. That is down to the linking sites and you can't do much about it.
Concentrate on other factors such as content but never expect to jump ahead of the big guys on major search terms. You are never going to rank ahead of the major news networks, for example, for topics such as "news" or "sport".

[Automotive site]

"if you write a good blog with links and good keyword density"

What do you mean if you write a good blog with links?

As for keyword density, I personally prefer not to write content with focus on keyword density. I feel they result in unnatural content in that the focus ends up being to rank rather write for the visitor.