“Write Guest Posts”

“Don’t bother with article directories”

“Social bookmarking is the key”

You’ve probably heard all this and more while searching for SEO tips in the post penguin chaos. But, do you know what really works? What part of the advice is actually real? Personally, I would say social bookmarking is the one strategy that has shown phenomenal results post penguin, and I can say this from personal experience.

Before the Pandas and Penguins were unleashed upon us, we placed a lot of value on do-follow links; not anymore.  In the current scenario your social signals should be a combination of do-follow and no-follow links. So, my advice is not to focus too much on either, instead work on:

Creating remarkable content: In simple words make it relevant and useful enough to be share-worthy.

Catering to all the verticals: You can drive traffic to your website through images, text, and videos. Your content should therefore, include all three elements so that you can create multiple doorways to web traffic.

Installing and using social bookmarking widgets: Personally, I have benefitted a lot from bookmarking content to the following websites:

Google+

Delicious

Digg

Blogger

Stumbleupon

Tumblr

Reddit

Tip’d

Twitter

You can of course add more sharing sites to the list, the more the merrier! The two social sharing widgets I would recommend are:

ShareThis

AddThis

Both open up drop down menus with several social bookmarking buttons, thus making it easier for visitors to share your content through their preferred networks.

Using document-sharing sites: Issuu and Scribd are document-sharing sites that will give you backlinks; the latter though only offers no-follow ones. I have found both these sites quite useful for driving traffic to my website and collecting valuable linkjuice.