As I already mentioned off page SEO doesn't have to do anything with changing your pages. It is mostly done through creating a backlinks to your site. According to some SEO reports I read, off page SEO is much more important to Search Engines than on page.
Links to your site from other sites have a great influence on how your site will be ranked by Search Engines. Therefore, when placing links on other sites, you should always follow two simple rules:
1. Always try to place a link back to your site on a websites that receive more traffic then your site and have a higher Page Rank (PR)*!
2. Always place your links on a sites with a relevant content to your own site!
First one will get your link higher exposure (the more people will see it) and SE spiders will crawl your site sooner and more often (your site will be indexed fast and your SE listings will improve).
Second one will bring you more targeted visitors and also improve your SE listings.
* Page Rank is a Google's measure of a site's importance. Page Ranks range from 0 to 10. It doesn't mean that a page has high traffic if it ranks high. It rather shows the establishment and importance of a webpage on the Internet. You should download and install Google Toolbar, if you have not already done so. It shows you the Page Rank of every page you visit. Google Toolbar is also available for Mozilla Firefox browser.
With Google Toolbar, you'll be able to check rank of every page you visit online. That way you'll know if a page is good enough to place a link on it.
It is also very important for offpage SEO to have one way links to your site and with no redirects. Your links should be formatted in that way so they contain keywords - example:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com">Old Cars</a>
In this example word "Old Cars" will be hyperlinked and if a link is direct, keyword "Old Cars" will be used by Search Engines to associate it with your site. It is also helpful to add an attribute "title" in your anchor tag and include some keywords:
<a href="http://www.yoursite.com" title="Buy Old Cars">Old Cars</a>
SE spiders appretiate only direct links. They don't follow redirects, so if a site uses redirects that link may bring you traffic, but will be useless for SEO. Also one way links to your site will be far more appretiated than reciprocal (exchanged links).
I have already discussed link building techniques in a Free Traffic section. The most important ones for a successful SEO are:
1. Article distribution - best way to get many one way links;
2. Placing your site in Internet directories - especially Dmoz (ODP) and Yahoo (if you can afford 299$ annually);
3. Blogging (currently very popular) - your site may be indexed within a few days;
Other techniques I mentioned should also be used. There are some link building techniques that are considered "link spam" techniques and these should be avoided. They used to be very popular earlier, but today may damage your ranking. They include link exchanges, posting to FFA sites and forums and even buying links.
Buying links used to be very popular, especially if you wanted a link from a page PR7, PR8 and even PR9. Today this is no longer effective technique, since major Search Engines disapprove this method.
SEO is not a quick and easy process. Even if you do everything right, you'll probably have to wait some time to see some results. And you have to continue to learn and educate yourself constantly since everything is changing, especially in the SEO world and Internet.
