geek,
Now I AM confused. I explained how to check future rankings above. Just use the IP address of Big Daddy–its no secret. As far as secrets for obtaining rankings? Its just hard work. I dont do much linking but I have won several awards for Creative Writing. As I may have mentioned before, I am a writer and a software developer–usually technical people cannot write and writers aren’t the most technical of individuals. I think this combination is what helps me in this business.
For example, let’s say you have a business that sells widgets. I could write 500 words on ‘Blue Widgets’ for your Blue Widgets product page and 500 DIFFERENT AND UNIQUE words on ‘Red Widgets’ for your Red Widgets products page etc. I am not trying to pat myself on the back, but I think this is a talent that not a lot of people have. And 200 colors of widgets later, I will have written several volumes on widgets for your widgets website and your widgets pages will be ranking well. I will also tweak the HTML so that the keyword density, Title and Descriptions are perfect for whatever SE we are optimizing for.
So here’s a way to get traffic in this business: Review every online slot machine (I think there are something like 2000 of them) and create an optimized page of about 350-600 words for each one. Get back to us in ten years and let us know how it went! 
Say you are not into slots, poker then? You could write for the rest of your life and not cover poker! Tournament results, games, strategies, blogs, you name it?
You just need to be creative.
In closing I like to ‘trick’ myself into thinking that each page I create will be an extra $10/month -on average-in income for life. This doesn’t sound like much, big deal $10/month but when I have 100 pages completed and ranked, well there’s $1000/month and I never have to create those pages again. Now, this is just a ballpark, but in this area its very attainable. As we all know, you may get a couple pages that rank well and bring in most of your income, and the average per month could be well higher than $10/month and some never rank at all. This is just a figure I use to motivate myself because its an easily attainable goal. If you are NOT making at least $10/month per page of your sites after about 18 months, I would say you could be doing better.
This motivates me when I am developing, writing etc etc for months on end without seeing any results. Finally, I spend 95% of my time writing and 5% linking. This is the business model I use because I think the importance of linking must be reduced in the future-so I dont focus a ton on it now-how else can these SEs fight spam? I mean they have 2 choices, either drastically reduce the importance of linking OR go site by site to weed out the offenders. I mean, what would be easier?
Hope this helps.