Off-page ranking factors In SEO (Like SB,Reciprocal links,etc)

1. There is a strong misbelief that reciprocal linking does not work anymore. That's not true. It does work, but the efficiency of this method is much much lower than it was in 2003. In 2009 Google greatly reduces the value of reciprocal links, especially for the schemes a and c, but the whole concept still works and really helps to gain rankings on early and middle stages of SEO promotion when literally every link counts.
   
   Though there are some exclusions (as always however). Needless to say that you still have to choose the partners for reciprocal linking very carefully. Consider the theme of the linking website, its quality, its neighbourhood (other sites it links to), consider the page that would point to your site, pay attention to the anchor text of the link etc. You don't want to exchange links with spammy websites, or websites that use e-mail spam to suggest the partnership. You don't want a link buried 17 clicks away from the homepage.
   
   Usually you don't want a nofollow link, but even a nofollow link from a relevant site can bring a load of target visitors to your site so it is up to you to decide whether it is only the link juice that you expect from the link exchange, or the auditory too. By the way, you also don't want a link from a page already having 50+ links on it. And the final yet still important note: do not e-mail website owners all over the web with link exchange proposal! That sucks, man, and no one answers anyway, while you will put your karma down to zero with such activity and possibly will receive a penalty from SpamCop or some other paranoid bastards. Don't do that, I tell you.
2. Web directories:One more technique that everyone tells it doesn't work anymore. Well, to be honest the efficiency of web directories never was so amazing. In fact there is only one web directory you certainly want to be included into: Google's Open Directory (or DMOZ). Google Directory is a free, human-edited web directory of high value. It is a bit tricky to get included into it, because it often takes months before your submission will be approved (if it ever will), but the game worths the candle - a link from DMOZ is a significant boost to your website value and a drop of life-giving link juice too.If you have some free funds to spend, you may also want to be included into several paid inclusion directories, starting from Yahoo Directory which seems to be the most respectful of them. Also, here is a great article on directory submission you should definitely read. Don't miss the outstanding list of directories to submit too.
3. Social bookmarks
   They used to work very well, but due to enormous amounts of spam on the social bookmarking websites the method is not as efficient as it were 2-3 years ago. Promoting a website through the social bookmarking websites has its pros and cons:

1. Pro: SB websites get crawled very frequently - every 2 or 3 hours. This means if you manage to get there you will get your piece of traffic from search engines pretty soon.

2. Pro: Social bookmarks not only help you raise your link strength, but also bring some amont of pure traffic from the bookmarking sites themselves. Depending on the popularity of the article posted on SB the traffic to your website could vary from few grains of sand to a pure avalanche.

3. Con: Unfortunately, you cannot simply bookmark a link to your website and wait for traffic. This could have worked in the first days of social bookmarking, but now it does not. First, the amount of posts (diggs, reddits, stumbles etc) per minute does not leave many chances to each particluar post to get popular. Your bookmark simply may lost between hundreds of thousands others. Second, bookmarking websites often have either moderators or some way for other users to disapprove an inappropriate post or a bookmark. So if you post a bookmark of your own website, the link is deleted and your account is banned. Too bad.

There are some workarounds for this though.

§ The whitehat one. Post an article or some other valuable (do you hear me? I said valuable!) content on your website and wait until someone else links to it. Then you should bookmark that site instead. This won't increase your link popularity or PageRank, but still bring you visitors. Oh, did I forgot to tell that the other linking site could be yours too? So you may have a commercial website with the article and a non-commercial blog where you mention that commercial article. Or even you may have another blog where you mention the blog that mentions the commercial article (in the house that Jack built).

§ The blackhat one. Create as many fake accounts as you need to promote your bookmark on every social bookmark site. Getting tough now since the method has been revealed ages ago and now SB websites are highly loaded with such spam already.

4. Con: One more bad thing about social bookmarks is: they tend to work for a limited period of time. They bring you a splash of traffic in the short term, but then they simply deplete and only give few visits a week. On the other hand, even few visits still's more than no visits at all.

5. Con: And the worst thing about social bookmarking is the quality of the traffic they produce. The traffic of a social bookmarking website is not targeted well, it is based on the impulse of curiosity, not on the intent. This mean that you will (or will not - see above) receive a large load of traffic, but if you manage to convert merely 1% of it to customers you can congratulate yourself - you've done a good job! The conversion rate for this type of traffic is extremely low so this recipe only works well for a limited class of websites and products. Though it is still good if you want to build a community or simply need many people on your website for some reason (AdSense and so on).

4. Trust factors
   A bunch of ranking factors that you only have a limited control of. Each of such factors does not add a value directly to the rank of a website. Instead, they increase itstrust rating. Google (and other search engines too) prefers trusted websites and gives a boost to their ranking. Trust factors include:

0. Domain name age. Old websites seem more trustworthy than others. If the domain didn't change its owner - it gets even more trust points (though don't ask how many).

1. The number and quality of inbound links, the PageRank. If many other websites link to this one - it is considered trustworthy. The quality of links doesn't play a significant role though, since you cannot be responsible for the links pointing to your website as you got no any control on that. Otherwise it would be possible to hurt your competitors by posting links to them from some malware sites.

2. Website content. If a website uses pop-ups, pop-unders or some of the blackhat SEO methods - its trust rating gets lower.

3. Outbound links. If a website links to other trustworthy sites it gets a boost to its own trust rating.

I believe there are more, but these ones are the most important.

5. Press releases, related resources, word of mouth etc.
   That's a bit off SEO theme, but still can help to obtain a couple of links. You have some exclusive info? Share it with the community on some thematic resource. Do you have some astonishing news in your industry? Tell the world about it with a press release. Are you running a special promo action or offering a discount coupon? Let others know about it.