Off-site optimisation is as important if not more important than on site optimisation.

To blow allot of the misconceptions about SEO it is really marketing, allot of the industry has formed a shroud of mystique around the business of search and website optimisation and in most cases cannot tell anyone what they really do to search optimise your site. Website optimisation boils down to a few distinct categories that all work together to gain more traffic to your site and ultimately more sales, this is the goal in most cases anyway.

Off site optimisation is any optimisation that is not on your actual website.

Link building could be seen as the single most important factor in off-site optimisation

You may hear allot of talk about Google Page Rank, Google page rank is a method used to rate your sites relevance to the given topic of the site, this does not really have much effect on your ranking though and will show more in how often your site is indexed. Although page rank does have some affect organic rank, it really only comes into play with long standing competitor sites. This will ultimately have more to do with how many links the competitor has to their site rather than their page rank.

Because we are talking traffic increase I will bring up the point of external articles these can be submitted to directory services and article services. Apart from someone reading them and finding the information useful then following the link to your site and hopefully using your goods or services, these can also help with search optimisation as again we have the power of the link.

Be aware though that poor quality article sites, SPAM sites can be a waste of time, many sites simply are not indexed by Google or are quickly dropped off the indexes due to their SPAM related articles, look for quality directories and read a few articles first to gauge the quality of the content.

Getting links

Create viral content, useful and targeted around your market. Becoming a leader of information and resources within your market base, is a sure fire way of attaining relevant links. Write white papers on subjects pertaining to the goods and services your company offers, start a blog and encourage participation. As we like to say, 'engage your market'