Offpage SEO is at least as important as on-site SEO, but is often neglected. Offpage optimization basically consists of all of the ranking factors that are NOT located on your webpage, and you dont have direct influence to them.

When search engines look at your website, they also look at all of the sites that link to your site. Each site that links to your site gives your site a certain number of “votes”, based on several factors.

So, the more quality links you can get to your site, the higher you will rank in the major search engines. But before we can start gaining links to your site, we need to know what the ranking factors are. There are several factors that determine a link’s quality:

• Number of sites linking to you
• PR of the site linking to you
• Page title of the site linking to you
• Anchor text used in the link linking to you
• Number and type of links linking to the website that’s linking to you.
• Number of outbound links on the site that is linking to you
• Total number of links on the site that is linking to you
• IP Address of the sites linking to you.
• And some other things..

And remember buid your links slowly and steadily. If you’ll buy/build hundreds of links in short period of time you are risking the links being discounted as spam by the search engines. Also note that you shouldn’t use same anchor text for all the links you are creating.

Next tutorial will be about proper onsite optimization.