Off site search engine optimization or relevant link building is not just about building inbound links to one site and forgetting about it. A true link building plan is about building links for the purpose of driving up authority. But how do you do that?

Well, authority is based on a number of factors, but one of those factors is link relevance. Another factor is link age. And another is the authority of the site linking to you. If the authority of the site linking to you is important then it makes sense that your inbound links need to be from a high authority site – some of them, at least.

So how do you get high authority sites to link to you? One way is to go and find a bunch of high authority sites and bet for links, another way is to build those sites.

Let’s say you have Site A and you build another site, Site B, to link to Site A. That helps Site A, but how does Site B build authority without attracting links of its own. You need to do your normal link building for Site B to increase its authority so that links from that site to Site A become more valuable. Those are called second generation links.

Links to Site A from Site B are first generation links. Links you build to Site B are second generation links. Their purpose is to increase the authority of Site B so that links from there to Site A carry more weight. You can also link from the same sources that link to Site B to Site A as long as you don’t also link from Site a back to those sources or from Site B to those sources. You don’t want to give off signals of a network. But you don’t want to build solid and relevant one-way links that over time grow in authority for all your relevant sites. The bottom line is to provide value in any of the websites that you own with a solid purpose and goals. Promote your websites the right ways, from many different relevant sources over time and the search engine authority will follow.