Off-site SEO is simply about getting sites to link to your site. All major search engines use links to determine how important your pages are and getting links from other sites is likely the most important thing you can do with your time.

Getting links from other sites is as difficult as you make it. There are multiple methods that are available, and I will outline some of them for you with the remainder of this article.

Blogging creates links naturally. If you use any of the mainstream blog platforms, they will alert blog search engines when you publish an entry. If you don't use a blog platform you can let the blog search engines know manually by pinging each. As bloggers read your blog they will naturally link to information they like.

WordPress blogs are automatically configured to ping blog search engines, so if you don't have a blog set up yet, do yourself a favor and go with WordPress.

Another easy and interesting method for getting links to your site is by writing articles. There is and will always be a huge need for information on the internet, and there are hundreds of sites where you can have your articles published. Most sites will allow you to give yourself credit at the bottom with a nice link.

Doing a quick search in Google for 'article directories' will make it easy to find plenty of sites to have your article published on. Submitting an article takes about 5 minutes which is a pretty cheap link.

Many webmasters exchange links in order to get more links from other sites. This practice is called reciprocal linking and is still used quite a bit, although it isn't as effective as it used to be. While doing a reciprocal link exchange, you agree to link to a site in exchange for the site linking to you.

One of the main benefits of doing a reciprocal link campaign is that you normally get to choose the exact anchor text that you want to use. Getting anchor text with the keywords you're trying to target will go a long way towards getting ranked well for those keywords in search engines.

Forum marketing is also a very common method for getting links. Many forums will allow you to place a link to your site in your forum signature. You can often use whatever anchor text you want, so this method can be quite effective.

If you have a site, make sure that you're working on off-site optimization for search engines. If you don't, you'll never reach the top!