Could someone quick reply to this question? It would really help!

Content and domain name as an exact match to the search term.

You do not need back links to rank a site in every situation

What Rus said, and the site is based on Wordpress, so they're likely using some plugins to help their cause: xml-sitemaps, etc.

Yeah, our competition "had" a new site, a 1 pager at that using adobe, ranking No. 1 for a few weeks,
all he did was kw in domain, kw for css file, no images, and Arial MT bolded the whole 5 paragraphs of content. ..0 backlinks and now it is still in top 10 though. relevancy was spot on so that helped them too.

Looks like a Google Sniper site to me. Sniper sites do not require great number of backlinks as they optimize the whole site around just one keyword.

Anup

Only 3 posts to but a quick look shows that the first words in the meta description and keywords are the same as the keyword which is also in the site url .

I note that there is also use of the following <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.easyplywoodboatplans.com/" />

If you look down the page you find

Plywood Boat Plans
Do you want to learn how to build your own boat? This is where you can get started with plywood boat plans that you will be proud to sail in!
Plywood Boat Plans

Now the main differences without trawling through the content between these two new and hardly any posts blog is the meta tags and the canonical ref.

The first site is PR1 with one backlink and the second is PR0 with 18 backlinks which I think goes to show how important it is to get the set up of the site right in the first place.

Does anyone have any views on the canonical link ref? Good/Bad/Essential?

Sometimes the rank is temporary ,it can be sandboxed by google .

Most important factors in Ranking :

-Site Age
-Keyword in URL
-Keyword in Domain name
-Keyword in Title tag
-Keyword in Description meta tag
-Keyword in Keyword metatag
-Keyword in alt text
-Keyword in H1, H2 and H3
-Keyword density in body text 5% to 7%
-Internal linking
-Quality and unique content

Thanks for all the feedback but I gues no one could answer the question:

Yes it is snipper site. But there are other snipper sites with the same words inthe domain name but they are still ranked lower than this site. Those low ranked snipper sites got the keyword in domain name, title, and have higher backlinks. So I dont udnerstand why is that happeneing?

H1 tags and H2 tags, the domain name is the keyword and the content is specific to that keyword. As simple as that, a bit of backlinking and it will most likely move to #1 position.

It is a lot about the backlinks.

Regards
Owen