My First Feeble Steps with 'Off Page' SEO

Now that my SEO Venture website, Snowman Ornaments & More!, has been indexed by Google it is time to begin 'off page' SEO efforts.  From what I've learned 'off page' SEO entails building a lot a backlinks back to my website.  Quality as well as quantity is the goal here.  What I want to see my page rank rise is a good number of quality backlinks with sites Google deems have 'authority'.  The more backlinks from authoritative sites the better.  This is called "Link Popularity".

Building link popularity is what off page SEO is all about.  It involves increasing the number of websites that link back to mine.  This is hard, time consuming work.  The best way to get quality backlinks is to have unique, informative content.  This really is the best way to get websites to link back to mine.   Content, however, is in the realm of on page SEO and not the topic of this posting.

So, here a the off page ways to help build my site's link popularity.

• Social Bookmarking Sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.).  I've joined several of these sites and created entries in them for my website.  Each of these entries each include a backlink to my site.  The entry on Digg was indexed within hours because of its highly dynamic content.  However, the entry on Stumbleupon has yet to be indexed.
• Social Networking Sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc.).  I joined Facebook and created a page for myself there.  In it I have created backlinks to all my websites. 
  
• Article marketing.   I've submitted several articles to ezine.com and 411article.com.  For every article, I have a resource box where I have a short bio and a link to my website. As the articles are accepted and published I will have a backlink to my website. 
• Forum marketing. I have found a number of online communities dedicated to the subject Christmas decorations and decorating.  I joined several of them and began participating in the forums.  I was allowed a signature box which included the URL of my website.  With each forum posting a backlink to my site was created.  Be aware that some sites flag forum comments as 'nofollow' that instruct search engines not to follow that link.  This impacts your page rank negativley.
  
• Place advertisements at www.craigslist.com . Craigslist is a well known classifieds website with a very high page rank of PR7.   I posted an advertisement in the appropriate category that included a link back to my website.  Some people have created ads in multiple geographic locations but be aware that Craigslist may have started a geotargeting policy by allowing you to post advertisments in your own geographic area.

I tried to implement as many of these strategies as I can.  But, as you can guess, this can take a lot of time and effort. I have to remind myself to be patient during this process.  Just as it took a week for Google to index my website, it will take time for these links to be crawled and for my site to rise in the page ranks.  Also, as a newbie, I have no idea which of these strategies will be most effective and which will be a waste of time.  I will endeavor to determine which is true and tell you about it in a later post.