To make your web site popular on the Internet and gain a good rank in the search engine results, you need to focus on on-page and off-page optimization of your web pages. The following steps are some suggested ways of doing off-page optimization of your web site:

• Work to get relevant inbound links to your web site from high PR web pages. Remember that the inlinks should be related to the main theme of your site. Don't go for excessive reciprocal linking or else you may be penalized. Usually, three way linking is preferred by many to get backlinks to their web sites.
• The older your backlinks are, the better. Try to stay away from temporary links as they will vanish after sometime, doing little to help your site rankings.
• Use your targeted keywords in the anchor text of backlinks that point to your site.
• Create a Google sitemap and submit it.
• Don't go for excessive cross-linking.
• A good ways to get backlinks to your site is to write quality articles and submit them to article sites. If you offer some unique and useful information, your article will get easy approval. This in turn will offer a free backlink to your site.
• Submit your web site to the popular search engines manually.
• You can submit your site to some niche directories. However, it is better to avoid the free-for-all directories where no approval is required to get your site listed.
• Use a reliable host for your web site that helps your web pages loads fast and is not hosting bad sites (because you will surely not love to have your web site in bad company).