Powerful Firm

I’ve often thought about what it will take for my website to rank well on Google? The question is why my site is not ranking well? I have a lot of aff. sites out there that need some good search engine optimization attention but I don’t know where to start. I guess I could buy backlinks or or get some links, but I’m not too sure that it would help me too much. I want to succeed but just feel overwhelmed most of the time.