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So it sounds to me that you really just need to focus on the SEO basics, don't do things that you know you're not supposed to do just to try to speed things up (like building a bad link profile) and focus on understanding who your audience is so you can create content that's better than "not too spammy".  Remember, doing SEO stuff without a high regard to its correctness or its adherence to Google's webmaster guidelines gets a lot of newbies in trouble.