Social bookmarking might sound like a strange ritual that little Midwestern housewives do to one another’s copies of Tony Morrison’s Beloved or a strange Mormon ritual that has something to do with a Pearl of Great Price, but in this instance, we’re talking about SEO. Social bookmarking is a common enough activity for backlink building: you go to a site like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or GoogleBuzz, and you create a backlink that points at your stuff.

Sounds quick, simple, and effective. Except that the effective part isn’t really all that effective. Google — and we have to talk about Google because they have an 80% market share of searches — Google, in it’s endless quest to thwart internet markers, has developed a few easy ways of eliminating 90% of internet marketers’ social bookmarking efforts.

The first method is to ignore any social bookmarking account that only points at material from one or two authors. Their algorithm automatically does a WhoIs query on every website they get linked to, so they’ll know that a given bookmarking account only points to your site unless you manage to come up with different identities for each of your sites. That alone eliminates almost every solo webmaster or outsourced backlinker in one go.

But beyond that, they also examine the timestamps on the various backlinks that point to your site — and if they see that your incoming links are coming in ‘bursts’ (like, nothing for 18 hours and then 170 links from 170 different sites over the course of 4 hours), they ignore that, too. That prevents all of the backlinkers who think they’re going to be clever and use software to build dozens of links at a time from getting anywhere.

So what is ‘Real’ social bookmarking? Simple: it means that you use social bookmarking the same way that you use blog posting — you do it often, you do it about different subjects, and you act like a real human being. The truth is that Google loves social bookmarks — as long as they look and feel like they’re from real people who are really interested in what they’re doing. If you can do that, you can make Social Bookmarking really work for your site.

Everyone today takes the existence of SEO companies for granted, but few people remember just how easy SEO was back in the early days. Before we had Google, the monster powerhouse that was determined to produce the best possible results for the searcher, there was a plethora of search engines that were rather content to just show people whatever page had the most backlinks and happened to have the search phrase on it.

SEO in the ’90s was a very fast and unclean affair, with major companies swapping links and starting linkrings and sometimes outright buying placement (before the existence of the now-ubiquitous “Sponsored Links” blocks!). In many cases, if you were an Internet startup competing with another Internet startup for a keyword, it literally came down to which one of you could find more directories to submit a backlink to. SEO companies were named things like “Yahoo”, and they did things like sell you places on their highly-ranked directory — which virtually ensured you a first page placement, even on search engines that didn’t belong to Yahoo.

Then, along came Google. A simple, clean search engine that focused on exactly two things: speed and accuracy. Google came up with results that were completely different from it’s competitors, and amazingly, most people found that the results Google gave were less commercial and more of what they wanted to see! Within three months of the company’s formation, when it was still operating out of a garage in southern California, PC Magazine recognizes the search engine’s “uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results.”

Suddenly, the game was afoot. SEO companies scrambled, because Google’s algorithm was proprietary, so no one knew exactly how it worked, and it was consumer driven, meaning that Google deliberately spurned the usual SEO techniques of the day and relied on information outside of the ken of the then-modern SEO company.

Since then, as Google’s market share grew from “lots” to “overwhelming”, they have continuously updated their algorithm to account for every clever new move the SEO community has taken to ‘cheat’ their way onto the front pages of the popular search engine. In a way, it’s been good for the SEO experts, because without Google, we’d all still probably be searching for new directories to add to our list.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, one of your websites that’s been pulling in regular money for some time simply stops. On the extreme end, it got sandboxed, but often it’s something less than that. Perhaps a competitor managed to outrank you for a crucial keyword, or maybe an ad that’s been bringing in a lot of traffic is against the ad hoster’s latest TOS. Whatever the reason, when a website unexpectedly stalls, there’s one easy way to get it profitable again quickly: an Adwords campaign headed by a talented PPC management team.

Many webmasters are scared sockless of pay per click advertising, either because they had a bad experience with it or they’ve had some guru tell them horror stories. What no one will admit is that, with correct PPC management, Adwords (or any of the equivalents on the lesser search engines) can be the only way to pull profit out of a profitless site.

You still need conversions, of course — if your website stalled out because you changed something that dropped your conversions from three percent to half a percent, change it back — but if you’re converting well and what you need is fast, targeted traffic, PPC is your cash cow. Many people will tell you to avoid it because you don’t want to pay “that much” for traffic, but the truth is that a talented PPC management team can keep the costs down (even given their own fees) while keeping the traffic up.

You can improve the situation even more by improving conversions with a Web Presenter or a carefully organized Targeted Email Marketing campaign — after all, traffic from PPC is just like traffic from any other targeted source.

Just remember that PPC is like health care: you do, eventually, want your website to be walking without the Adwords crutch. For that, you’ll need to pursue an aggressive strategy of organic SEO and make sure that your natural traffic starts to flow again. Until that point, however, you’re far better off with a solid PPC management crew driving profits than you are letting your website languish on the bed, slowly dying.

If only there was a traffic fairy. No, not the kind that would give you a quarter if you put a car under your pillow, but the kind that could wave it’s wand and suddenly give your website a thousand visitors per hour until the clock struck midnight, and then leave you with some ruby slippers that could repeat the process when you clicked them together three times.

Sadly, there is no traffic fairy, so those of us in the real world are left to find a good SEO company to guide the good people of Internet-ville to our little corner of that vast metropolis, and hope they buy something before they click off into the sunset.

The SEO services offered by such a company are literally invaluable. Many novice webmasters are intimidated by the thought of spending a few hundred dollars on some SEO work for their website, but in the end, SEO is like a Lego set. Once you have some, you can build quite a bit — and as you buy more, the things you can build only get bigger and better. Only unlike Legos, SEO gives you money back just for having it done right. How cool is that?

To put it another way, SEO work is kind of like sinking a few hundred dollars into a high-yield savings account. You have to put up a lot of money in order to make the minimum deposit, but as soon as it’s in, you start making cash, and as long as you keep reinvesting the profits, the amount of cash you make each day only gets bigger. It’s like Benjamin Franklin said, “The most powerful force on Earth is compound interest.”

Of course, for your interest to compound at the best possible rate, your SEO needs to be done right — and that takes expertise and experience. Those are a couple of things that you probably don’t have at this point in your career, and that’s exactly why you need an SEO company. Compound interest may seem like magic, but in the end, Virginia, there is no traffic fairy.

For years, participating in online bulletin boards relevant to your business’ subject has been a habit that internet marketing gurus have encouraged almost every webmaster to engage in. Quite some time ago, the habit of regular forum posting was very powerful SEO. Forums have a tendency to gather quite of bit of authority on their given subject, and with that authority they can get some decent PageRank as well. A backlink from a relevant, authority site with a high PageRank is the best backlink you can get, so it was considered worth quite a bit of effort to obtain.

But is forum posting still worth the effort?

After all, forums have changed a lot in the past several years. Administrators generally ‘caught on’ to many of the most common forum marketing ploys (for example, preventing people from linking to off-forum site in their signatures). Not only that, but many forums have switched to no-follow links and other SEO-killing tactics. It’s also a lot harder to become a recognized and celebrated member of a large forum these days; the signal-to-noise ratio has become so bad that you have to be excellent in all ways just to be noticed as someone who isn’t ‘noise’.

But for all of that, the answer is “yes”. Forum posting is still worth the effort; you just have to apply your effort in a slightly different way. For example, check to see if a forum’s links are dofollow before you register. Look for forums that are smaller and more specifically focused. Rather than a Warrior Forum that has two million users, look for a Mobile Website Design Forum that only has a thousand. That’ll keep the signal-to-noise ratio more respectable.

Watch out for the pitfalls going in, and you’ll find that not only is it easier to establish a presence and plant a few quality backlinks, but it’s also easier to enjoy the process of doing so. With the right forum, you’ll probably even learn a few things along the way — and which of us couldn’t benefit from a bit of extra market research?