For the most part, off site SEO has to do with building inbound links.  This is by far the hardest part of search engine optimization because it can be difficult to learn how to get other websites to link to you.  In-bound links are crucial to building a presence in a search engine index as that is how a pages’ authority is judged.

There are many strategies for building links to your web pages.  Many consider any strategy of building links that is not link baiting as ‘black hat seo’ or unethical seo.  I can only tell you what I have learned so far and that is to keep your money sites backlinks very clean.

Dirty Links

Dirty links can be a very helpful way of building your sites authority in a search engine but you have to do this the right way.  I will say here that I am not an authority on building dirty links but I am learning to a degree and beginning to practice some dirty link building.  SEO Zombie has a very good post on dirty links and link laundering that can help shed some light on the subject.  I would just add that you can also point dirty links to some of the articles that link back to your main site.  If you hit an ezine article with 1000 dirty links you do not have to worry about Google deindexing ezinearticles.com.  The worst that would happen is they discredit the link back to your site in the article.  The plus side is that the ezine will become a page rank two or three and pass on some serious link juice to your site.

As far as mass commenting and things of that nature go, I have not used them.  Not because I would never use them, I just haven’t had to yet.  My keywords have been easy enough to rank for that all I had to use was some good content and some article marketing to rank number one in Google for my terms.  Seeing my site rank for number one for a search term I target is very addictive and I may use some dirty link building in the future to rank for some harder to rank for terms.

Questionable Link Building

Some forms of questionable link building are through social bookmarking sites, links back from another site that you own or anything that can be traced as being automated.  Your money sites may get away with receiving these types of links but be aware of the frequency with which you build these links, the variety of sites you link from and remember to vary your anchor text very often.  Aaron Wall has a great post on the topic of a good link growth timeline on his blog.  If you are building heaps of links to your money site do everything you can to appear natural.  Anything else puts your site at risk for at the very least being sandboxed.

Another example of a questionable link is a sitewide link exchange from another webmaster.  These links do help your off-site seo but are given less weight by todays search engine algorithms.  I have to say as a side that I have had a lot of success with sitewide link exchanges.  I know many seo experts say that these links are worthless but my adsense account would like to argue that point. 

Natural Links

A natural link is one that is not able to be traced back to you in any way.  The link comes from another site of a similar topic and is not reciprocated by the page it is being linked to.  Ideally these links are one-way, topical, in post (not sitewide) and from a site that is similar in subject matter to your own and not owned by you.  It may not be natural in the way that you did not ask for it or give something in return, it is natural in that a bot crawling your page cannot detect this link as being unnatural.

These links are what Niche Link Exchange is here for.  A good natural looking backlink can be the difference between page one and page three for your search term so getting these backlinks should be a part of your off-site seo strategy.