I am just a beginner and started my career as an seo intern, it's been only few months of my learning and found the importance of off-page optimizations. First and foremost is on-page optimizations without which all the off-page optimizations are worthless. After all the on-page activities are done then concentrate on off-page optimizations like directory submissions, social bookmarking, content recycling as in writing an article and submitting in article sharing sites, converting the article into blog posts, pdfs, infographs and also can do guest blogging in the related sites. While doing all these you can just add a link of your site/blog in the article and promote. This way you can get quality backlinks and also traffic only if your content is worth of a read. Apart from all these, we have other link building methods like "moving man method" "link reclamation" "link roundups" "skyscraper technique" which are doing pretty well these days in attracting more links.