I look the the world major search so for me it would be where they have the webmaster tools available such as google, bing, yandex, baidu
after submitting and working my onsite links with the search engines i would then as i am doing now looking at backlinks and partnerships.
from my experience its not an overnight job it does take time though to pick up traffic and that nice 1 million plus backlinks. which i am slowly working towards on a few sites