Don’t Necessarily Be First to Stumble, Digg, Sphinn or Mixx Even Your Best Content – Wouldn’t you rather an actual power user ‘Stumbled’ or Dugg your page? Power users are the lifeblood of these social networks and are always on the lookout for quality content and tidbits of interest. Power users control the traffic at these social media networks. If a social media power user discovers your site, you get a lot of brand building traffic. If you do it, you probably won’t, and your name will be sh*t in these networks.

Do take part in the social networks and find sites that are of interest to you. Why not try and use them the way they were meant to be used? Make connections. Play the game and don’t spam. How would you feel if your favourite site was plagued with stuff someone else was peddling and was patently rubbish? It just pisses people off.

Do add good content to your site. Eventually people notice.

Don’t submit your site to search engines. If you have a website design company, what do you think carries more weight? Google finding your site because it is linked to by the W3C or if you submit it yourself? OK – this is a very improbable scenario for a new site, but the thinking is the same. If you submit your site to search engines yourself, I think you’re missing out on a chance of an immediate relvancy score or google sandbox-busting trust boost.

Do add good original content to your site and get websites with relevant content to link to you. Eventually Google notices, too.

Don’t use forums to do nothing else than promote your company and link drop. Forums are a place to …er help others, not yourself. I won contracts worth £40,000 spending 10 hours in 1 forum doing nothing more then sharing what I know about seo. Forums are an excellent place to learn from others, network and share your expertise. If the only reason you are in a forum is to link-drop, then by in large you’re missing out.

Do help others and offer free advice. Potential customers can often perceive the quality of your service you sell by the advice you offer freely. A signature isn’t just useful for search engine discovery and anchor text

Don’t spam other people’s blogs. Do you really think that bloggers don’t notice you found their site typing “dofollow” + “blog” into Google? If you are in a linkbuilding mood, of course, Do visit blogs that are relevant to you – you’ll probably find a conversation that you can actually join in on. There are hundreds going on in blogs you visited today. If you are caught spamming blogs, you can easily be outed;

After outing this spammer, he decided to spam the network I outed him to! Ninja!

Don’t try to game the systems when it’s smarter, long term, to play by the rules.

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)