It depends upon the competitiveness of the keyword. For most keywords, I don't think that merely doing directory and article submissions, along with additions to social bookmarking sites will catapult you into the top 10. You need some solid, strong backlinks from authority sites on the subject.
it'll come, just keep working - follow what you see on the forums, one day you'll check and you'll have 10 keywords on the front page. From experience, it's a great feeling - plus the money's good too haha
Just go wid specific Forums Submission & do some Classifieds, most popular is Craigslist.org submit wid it upto some period of time. u vl get best result from it. Gud Luk!!
You can also do forums posting related to your site and blog commenting on some quality and related blogs
Lots of my keywords rank on the second page of Google too. But you just have to be patient. A new site of mine got indexed a week ago and I see it's getting better SERPS every day, that motivates me to promote my site on social bookmarketing sites, on forums, do article marketing, linkbuilding etc... Just keep on going and you will see number one results for your desired keyword/phrases.
Yea very true. For non-competitive kw, you can easily rank top 5 without doing much SEO. But it is almost a must to have a few strong backlinks to rank higher for competitive kw. If you just want to spend time doing article and directory submission, it is wise to submit your site to a high quality niche directory instead of the general crappy directory.
i think there are two more criterias for being top 10 on google serp. * site age which you are not able to effect on that * backlinks . i believe this the most important criteria that you can effect. you must build backlinks as much as you can do