Get as much as you can. That way you will much closer to the results you want to face. Just keep building up your links.
The more the better and also it depends on the keyword9s) you are promoting tha competitive ones wants more backlinks but i have seen some sites where they have around 500 backlinks and they are on top but when we study the links they are all from top clasee sites .so quality is also important
accroding to the suggestion of google not more than 10 links on the homepage not more than 100 links on the linkpage
there are probably way to many variables in how google ranks people to give a def answer to how to get in the top 10
For a key term that I am targeting which has google results of 15,300,000 The number one url has 35,000 backlinks, number two has 25,000 backlinks and number three has 6500 backlinks. I'm currently sitting at number 257 with around 350 backlinks. I have a lot of work ahead of me!