The most important technique of off-page optimization is ‘link building’. Link building is nothing but the process of getting other websites to link back to your page. Search engines look at links to verify if a website is relevant to a search, and assign ranks to pages depending on the number of links to the pages. Obviously, the more the number of sites that link to your page, the higher it appears in search engine rankings. But, it is not as simple as it sounds. Links can be high-quality or low-quality. The highest quality links come from government websites or educational institutions. A few links from these can catapult your website to the top of search rankings. On the other hand, links from pornographic sites, or gambling fraternity sites, may detract from your site’s search ranking.

Back links that point to your web page are powerful off-page factors that determine your search engine ranking, and consequently the amount of traffic that you attract. There is no dearth of websites that have relevant content to a search, but figure poorly in rankings due to lack of link building.

All search engines use this ranking system of pages in some form or another to put their search results in order. They typically consider the following factors:

• Number of links to websites to and from your page
• Ranking of websites that directly link to your page
• Whether your page is part of a directory listing

Thus, the best of on-page site optimization techniques will not help much if an important step like link building is skipped. It may be time-consuming and somewhat expensive, but is definitely worth the cost and effort involved.