Many novice SEOs focus on only the on-page optimizations such as keyword stuffing, alt tags, css class names, and even order of the web page itself.  They don’t know that on-page work represents only a fraction of ranking victories, especially on harder keywords.

Off-page tweaks is usually a factor a site owner can’t manage also, but it cannot be ignored.  This type of effort is made up of all manner of link building at your “money site” and includes blog posts, forum profiles, web 2.0 links, and many others.

Link building SEO efforts is typically thought of as grey or black hat because Google frowns upon link building of this type.  Most popular e-commerce website uses link building as a part of their SEO plan, and many high profile companies such as JC Penny and Nokia have been caught using these approaches.  Be smart when link building and realize that you are walking a bit close to the edge.

When building links to your site, it is important to remember several guidelines in mind:

-  Link diversity:  Build using several link types.

-  IP diversity:  Build a few links on a lot of sites instead of a lot of links on a few sites.

-  Keyword diversity:  Build links using multiple keywords.

-  Link velocity:  Build smoothly and evenly, dripping out the links on a regular basis.

-  Footprint:  Be natural with your link building.  Make it look like a human built the links. in mind.

-  Link awareness:  It’s critical that all of your backlinks get crawled to improve your rankings.  Crawling the backlinks is (obviously) required for them to be registered by Google.  Link crawling gets them dumped into Google’s crawled index and ends up helping with indexing.

How important link crawling is can’t be emphasized enough.  If your link isn’t crawled then Google doesn’t know about it.  So at a minimum, link crawling is needed to rank your web site.  It is critical to have volume and high quality of links, but awareness is the first step.

There is also some of debate about indexing and if it’s necessary for links to count.  In numerous tests it’s been shown that indexing is absolutely not required to rank a keyword in Google.  This makes logical sense because Google only is aware of a small bit of the web and shows us an even smaller fraction in the search results.  Google simply can’t keep all of the backlinks from the entire net in their live search database.  But it would be easy for Google to track backlink quantity directed towards your website. How many un-indexed links is the same as one indexed link hasn’t been determined, however.  This exercise would be a challenge but educational case study to run.

As you build your links, it’s crucial to follow your results with care so you learn what helps and doesn’t work.  You’ll rapidly figure out how correct the above link building strategies are, and finally come up with your own specific practice to guide to rank your terms.  Be careful trusting what you learn in the SEO forums and blogs and be sure to double check link reports you get from vendors for correctness.

SEO is constantly evolving and adapting, so as an SEO you should stay up.  There is an arms race with Google and the SEOs, and if you genuinely want to make a living online you should use all of the tools at your disposal.