You should have more links pointing to your site, but you are not sure that what is the best approach to pursue them. Many sites are competing with yours only for the search terms, not products and services.

You can take advantage of the high rankings of other sites. This technique is named as piggybacking. They have what you seek, a highly placed link for a specific search phrase so rather than try to unseat their ranking, which could take you months and never happen anyway, will do the next best thing is to pursue a link on the sites with the best rankings that wont compete with you.

Imagine that if you had links on every site that had a top 10 search result for phrases that you have to care about.

You might use this technique also, identify the good targets that you can advertise on. In other words, the websites have high rankings for terms that are important to you are natural places for you to buy banner or even text links on. You may get lucky and find they have a reciprocal links page.