Many beginning SEOs focus on solely the on-page optimizations such as keyword stuffing, meta tags, css class names, and even structure of the web page itself.  They don’t realize that on-page work comprises only a fraction of ranking victories, even more so on more difficult keyword phrases.

Off-page tweaks is typically a factor a site owner can’t control also, but it shouldn’t be forgotten.  This type of work is made up of all type of link building at the “money site” and includes blog posts, blog comments, social bookmarks, and many more.

Link building SEO efforts is typically thought of as grey or black hat because Google doesn’t like link building of this kind.  Most high profile ecom web site uses link building as a component of the overall SEO strategy, and most well known corporations such as JC Penny and Sony have been busted using these approaches.  Use your head when link building and realize that you are on the edge.

When building links to your site, it is important to remember a few guidelines in mind:

-  Link diversity:  Don’t just build one link type.

-  IP diversity:  Build a few links on a lot of sites instead of a lot of links on a few sites.

-  Keyword diversity:  Build links using multiple keywords.

-  Link velocity:  Don’t build 1,000,000 links at once.  Instead, drip feed out a few hundred a day.

-  Footprint:  Be natural with your link building.  Make it look like a human built the links. in mind.

-  Link awareness:  It’s important that all of your links get crawled to improve your rankings.  Crawling the backlinks is (obviously) required for them to be registered by Google.  Link crawling gets them dumped into Google’s crawled index database and ultimately helps with indexing.

The importance of link crawling can’t be over-stated.  If your link isn’t crawled then Google doesn’t know about it.  So at a minimum, link crawling is needed to rank your web site.  It is important to have quantity and high value of links, but awareness is the requirement.

There is also some of discussion about indexing and if it’s necessary for links to count.  In several case studies it has been revealed that indexing is absolutely not necessary to rank a keyword in Google.  This makes perfect sense because Google only is aware of a small bit of the web and displays an even tinier fraction in their SERPs.  They physically can’t keep all of the links from all of the web in their live search database.  But it’d be easy for Google to track link count directed towards your site. How many un-indexed links is the same as one indexed backlink has not been identified.  This case study would be a difficult but interesting test to track.

As you build your links, it’s important to track your results carefully so you learn what helps and doesn’t work.  You’ll rapidly learn how true the above link building strategies are, and ultimately come up with your own specific practice to follow to rank your terms.  Be careful trusting what you learn in the SEO bulletin boards and blogs and be sure to double check link reports you get from companies for accuracy.

SEO is constantly changing and adjusting, so as a marketer you need to keep up.  There is a war between Google and the online marketers, and if you really want to make a living online you need to use every weapons you can.