I would say that at least 60% of my SEO efforts are wasted. You just have to keep on doing it until eventually you will see some good results. I think that forum signature postings is very effective, and of course buying links.
Forget all about linking and write good content and let it happen naturally - PR (Page Rank is named after Larry Page) Get a link from Larry Page for merit would likely be worth more than any other backlink LOL I believe when Google said "Go and get links" they meant produce content others will link to and that's that.
If you're wasting 60% of you SEO efforts, you should stop doing SEO. Find someone else to do it for you, or become better at it. You'll end up spending way too much time for very little in return. You're right, you should focus on content, the first thing I teach my designers when it comes to SEO is to build the site for the visitor first. I tell them certain things to keep in mind, but it's about the user first, search spiders second. Search engines don't buy my products, visitors do. There's nothing wrong with going out and getting links to your site, they are a big factor for how well you rank. However, the more diverse your link profile is, the better off you are. I'm still sick of hearing about Page Rank, this is such a meaningless metric, the only thing that it may still be good for is passing a stronger vote to other sites. High PR will not help you rank.
Sorry if this sounds stupid but how can you use social networking/media sites to promote your website could someone tell me which sites are best and an example of their promotion on these sites, do you create a an add page for your site and do you have to pay for it?
There are some good lists of do follow blogs if you search on google. Just blog commenting from these are a good source of links.
Things have gone beyond submitting websites manually here and there and driving backlinks. Today, if you want to have a competitive edge over your competition, you need to use automated tools like SeNuke, Traffic Geyser, Link Dozer, etc., These are the most powerful methods to have quality backlinks...