Im probably telling most of you guys something you already know..... But I found proof of the extreme importance of anchor text A website I know, that has around 40 backlinks.... all of a sudden started coming high for a search term...... I did a backlink check using a software program I use, and it turns out that phrase was on 4 of their backlinks....... and they came up in 1st page, even though those words were not on their Title tag, meta tag, domain, body, etc.!
40 backlinks in Google could be a few thousand in reality, so it is not wrong to serp for a term with so low backlinks