Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a science of sorts that would enable you to ensure a favorably prominent position for your website in search engine results pages (SERPs). And since 80% of your traffic would come from the search engines, SEO methods take on a critical importance in the success of your online endeavor.

There are two kinds of SEO, on page and off page. This article will tackle the latter.

Off page SEO is all about the things you could to get a high page rank (PR) for your website after it has already gone live. These are the things which you actually execute outside the pages of your website, hence the name of this type of SEO.

What are these steps?

Well, all of them are concerned with building your link popularity. Your link popularity represents the number of back links your website has. To check you websites current link popularity, head over to www.linkpopularity.com and use the free tool that can be found there. The higher your link popularity, the higher your PR will be.

Building your link popularity involves increasing the number of websites that will link to yours. This is easier said than done. Its not a matter of getting reciprocal links like you link to me and Ill link to yours. Google, in particular, despise reciprocal linking. You have to get unilateral links to your website.

The best way to do this is by ensuring that you have unique, highly informative content. Really, this is the number one strategy to invite websites to link to yours. But your content in the realm of on page SEO, and it is assumed that you have made all efforts to ensure great content.

What are the other ways by which you could build your link popularity? Try the following techniques:

* Article marketing. There are thousands of article directories on the Internet. You could submit articles to these websites. For every submission, you will be allotted a resource box where you could introduce yourself and share a link to your website. Now, some of these article directories have high page ranks. If your articles are accepted, they will be included in their pages. Having a website with high PR linking to yours would go a long way in increasing your own page rank. Additionally, if you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, youd have a thousand pages linking to your website! Sounds like a daunting task? There are article directory submission services available. Seek them out. For as low as $25, they could submit your articles to as many as 200 directories.

* Forum marketing. There are online communities dedicated to the subject that your website is serving. Seek them out, then join them. Youd be allotted a signature box, which would appear in your every post. In your signature box, you could leave a link to your website. Then post as many significant messages as you could. For every post you will make, youd have a page linking to your website.

* Advertise at www.craigslist.com . Now heres a novel strategy. The website www.craigslist.com is a well known classifieds website with a PR7 score. A PR7 score is rarely high! To have a link in a website like this would give a tremendous boost to your own website. Simply go to that site and choose the category that your pages belong to, then post your advertisement, with your link of course. It doesnt matter that no one would get to read it. What matters is that the search engine spiders would find your website as they would come from a PR7 site.

* Look for partners who are willing to include your list in their pages. The easiest way to do this is to use the free tool at www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php .

* Try triangular linking. Google despises reciprocal linking, but triangular linking is one way of going around this limitation. Look for two or more webmasters who are willing to give it a shot. Webmaster A could post a link to Webmaster Bs website in his own pages. Webmaster B can post a link to Webmaster Cs website in his own pages. And webmaster C can post a link to Webmaster As website in his own pages. It may enforce the same principle as reciprocal linking, but the search engine spiders are not programmed to figure this out yet.