Here are some SEO advices for beginners i can say.

First of all i am in this field for over 3 years. I can say that i don't like the time spent and that's why i hired someone. But before that here is what i have manage to learn:

1. Link Directories - Good only for PR (google case)
Example: I paid about 300$ for links on many directories, on PR3-5 pages. All good. When google crawled some of them the PR went to 1 or 2.
Conclusion - Don't waist your time too much and especially the money on those.

2. Social Bookmarking - 100 digs for some pages
Example: I had a Web 2.0 Design Tutorial website and got about 100 digs for some articles, technorati, del.icio.us and so on.
When checking backlinks digg.com showed only 5 of them.
Conclusion - Pretty good but make sure your article is 110% original.

3. Article Submission - 20 articles on "famous" article directories
Example: As i was writing the tutorials i thought "let's publish them".
Backlinks - very few after so much work

4. Link Exchange websites - Paid about 50$/monthly for 3 link exchange websites.
Example: I added my website to this websites and received about 400 links every month. I added a link exchange script with the "nofollow" attribute ON. I even added the disallow rule in .htaccess. All good so far.
After 3 months i got about 10 emails from different people asking me to remove their links because their sites were banned from Google.
Conclusion: Don't do this kind of link exchange.REALLY DON'T. Your link will end on a 100 link page which of course will end to banning from Google and who knows others too.

5. Paid Traffic - About 50$/monthly for as they said " 3000 unique visitors"
Example - Because i did not had the time to surf other websites i paid for this services.
Conclusion: Google Analytics was telling me that from 3000 visitors/monthly i got only 200 from that site.
Alexa was the only one who showed that i had heavy traffic. But if you don't pay for 1 month the Alexa rank will go down too. Don't waist your time with this.

here are lots of SEO techniques that can help your website to come up on a search engine. Article submission, link submission etc are the effective techniques. Update your website content regularly, this will also help your website to come up. They are both important, take the time to do them both.
SEO Tips and Strategy:-
Ethic way
Black hat techniques
Use of Link Farms and IBLNs
Employing useful tools like Google's Keyword & Trends helps gain an understanding on search term volumes.They help you to acquire link backs from several sites. But you need to provide a static link in each widget. The flip side is that some search engines do not like them.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-article ... z0qodSVi3L
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Essential Tips-
1.
Avoid buying domains with multiple dashes
2.
Beware who you link out to and do not participate in link exchanges with non-related content sites
3.
Do begin to obtain RELEVANT links from high authority pages and directories as soon as possible for both new and old sites
4.
Have a plan in place to update your site regularly with new content and shuffle featured content (e.g. homepage features) regularly. This will encourage more search engine spider activity and faster updates of your site.
5.
Build your links and submit to directories gradually. Mix up the anchor text of your incoming links with your top 5 or 6 keyword phrases and category keyword phrases.