What other factors affect rankings besides backlinks?

Where you’re getting your links, the quality of these links, the relevancy of these links, how many links you have and what keywords you’re using as the anchor text all affect your rankings. But there are other factors that affect your ranking, including but not limited to:

• On page optimization factors – this is how well you’ve optimized your tags, content, formatting, keyword proximity, site map, and links on your web page. This also includes whether you use your keywords at the top of your page and in your “alt” tags (both good things).
• Having a lot outgoing or reciprocal links pointing to “bad” sites (like link farms) – can negatively impact rankings.
• Whether you have unique content (which the SE’s like).
• How frequently you update your site. Faster isn't necessarily better. Check what ranks well for your niche and aim to match it.
• Whether your domain includes your primary keywords.
• Your domain’s age, reputation, IP address and whether it’s a top level domain (e.g., a .com is better than a .info although probably not by much).
• Shady practices such as keyword stuffing or using text that’s the same color as the background can negatively affect your rankings. Only an issue if your site gets manually inspected and you don't have a legitimate reason for it.
• Showing one page to the search engines and other page to visitors negatively affects your rankings. (Cloaking and doorway pages.)
• Frames negatively affect your rankings.
• Using content that the search engines can’t read, like audios, flash, videos, graphics (without alt tags), etc.
• Whether you have a robots.txt file that tells the search engine bots to stop crawling or indexing your site.