Keyword is it the key factor

I often search google and other search engine and for some keyword i always get same result. I dont understand how people manage to get thier wesbsite in the first five listing on the search page. What about people who have website from a year or two and they have not even completed 1000 hits on the site. Blog are interesting way of sharing things but trust me its keywords which is you master key. There are so many adsense keywords but none of them seems to works for many sites. So what is different with those sites that they are always ranked in the first five. It is not only keywords and you can try that by putting all the keywords in the meta tags from few of the succesful sites but still there will be no results. There are many other things that we need to consider while we try to optimize our blog to get more traffic. Only one thing you need to consider is links to external sites and links coming to your sites. Your content is your main element just remember that you used hot keywords in the content as well