How to Rank Well in the Search Engines Without Backlinks

To have your website achieve top rankings, you have to give the search engines and your site visitors what they've always wanted.  Search engines want to deliver the best quality sites to their users, therefore they want to provide them with the same thing your site visitors want, a good experience. 

So what makes for a good experience for search engine users and your eventual website traffic? 

Easy to navigate sites that are intuitively easy to get around via links to certain categories or other related content keeps the visitors on your site longer, and this gets noticed by the search engines evaluating the average time each visitor spends on your sites.  The longer a user spends on your site reading your content, the better the site is deemed to be for the visitors, experience-wise, and that's one of the ways search engines are ranking sites.

However, it's easier said than done to make your web traffic remain on your site longer.  You need quality content and long articles, and preferably more than just one content piece on that particular topic.

When the accumulation of keywords used in these multiple articles gets indexed, that's where your site architecture comes into play.  If your site architecture is organized in such a way that the readers can go from the article they're reading to another related article without much searching, the navigation by itself will cause your web traffic to remain longer on your site.  Increasing page views per visitor leads to an increase time spent on site, and this leads to better rankings.

So not only does your content have to be good enough to engage the readers, but there also has to be enough content in each category to have your site get ranked for all the keywords used in those articles.  Eventually, your site will rank well for all the keywords in those categories but it takes time to produce quality content in volume like this.

Can you achieve high rankings without mounting any laboriouslink buildingcampaigns?

No, you still need to obtain some backlinks because no site will do well "as an island".  You still need some links acting as votes to tell the search engines that your site is indeed a site about a certain topic.  If you follow the age-old SEO advice of writing for people instead of search engines you will rank well, always.  Just remember that writing for your audience isn't the only thing you have to do to rank well.  You also have to design your site in an organized and navigationally-friendly way to encourage more page views and create a longer, more fulfilling visitor experience.