While it is vital to get on page optimization right, the more competitive keywords you might be targeting require additional effort away from your site, a practice commonly referred to as off page optimization. Broadly, this involves the practice of getting other sites on the internet to link back to yours.

The first thing to appreciate is that not all backlinks are equal. A link from a site that is considered an authority site by the search engines is far more valuable than one that comes from a lower rated site. This differentiation can be assessed by the Page Rank (PR) of the page that is linking back to your site. The higher the PR, the more authority that site has in the eyes of the search engines. The PR scale runs from 0 to 10 and broadly speaking, a link from a site that is 3 or above should be regarded as valuable.

Next, we need to consider how to go about generating backlinks and also, to ensure that only so called, white hat, methods are used. This essentially involves links being built naturally. I will take this opportunity to provide an overview of the main white hat methods of link building.

The best methods of building backlinks is by distributing unique content around the internet with a link back to your site and just as importantly, these links should be to various pages of your website, not just the homepage. Typically, content can be distributed in the form of articles, press releases, videos and software. You can also use briefer content sound bites on various social networking sites such as Twitter and Squidoo in particular.

Other methods of generating good quality backlinks might include commenting on relevant blogs and forums. Increasingly, people are also looking at building profiles on forums and online magazines as a valuable backlinking method. However, backlinks from these sources will only have search engine value if they are DoFollow environments.

Building links back to your site is one thing but an often overlooked element is to increase the power of these links by pointing other sites towards them. This is a practice known as increasing the link juice. There are several ways of increasing link juice but the main two are to create an RSS feed of your links, hosted either at a third party website or on a secondary hosting account, and to submit the RSS feed of your links to RSS aggregator sites. The second method is to create a social bookmark of the various links that are pointing to your site.

The process of getting the search engine spiders to arrive at your site via your backlinks rather than directly is very powerful as this adds weight to the links and helps to increase the authority of your site. As an aside, you should also consider making the outgoing links from your site NoFollow so that your site does not lose some of the link juice you are creating.

This article provides an overview of the main methods of off page optimization. In future articles I will be looking at several of these in more depth so that you can maximize your link building efforts.

Simon Cooper is the owner of Top Traffic Sites, a resource site for website owners who are looking for the best ways of generating website traffic and the creator of Traffic Mania, the ultimate system for generating targeted internet traffic.