Techniques for submission

I started to use a few services that are offered here and wanted a little clarification and would appreciate any information that may help.

Submitting to directories:
Are all directories similar or are there better directories to submit to than others.

Bookmarking:
Are all bookmarking sites similar or are there better bookmarking site to submit to than others.

There is another person who is offering services for bookmarking that mentions that his are do follow sites, how would I know if they others who offer the same services are do follow sites as well

Misc.
Do any of you offer additional services that will help my site get higher rankings in google, etc. or can you also refer me to any others on this site that do a good job...

Also, do I need to be very careful as to which services may flag google, etc and get my site banned

Thanks
Brian

Digg is one of the better social bookmarking sites because it gets crawled by Google many times a day and your bookmarks there will show up on Google within an hour or two I think.

If you just stick with the largest SB sites, you can be sure that they're all ********. Check out social marker.

I don't do directory submissions..so I can't say anything about that. However, when you're linking, just make sure you don't link from link farms or other spammy sites and also, try not to get tons of backlinks in a day so that your link building looks more natural.

Sorry to tell you mate that not all largest SB sites are ********, stumbleupon, reddit are nofollow, they won't give you PR juices but they're great to get your site quickly found by search engines.

Some SB sites are definitely better than the others, but doesn't mean the less better ones are useless.
Nofollow links are still good, you don't want to just aim for position in google, other search engines still utilize nofollow links.

If you're looking for a good service providers you should ask what additional services can they offer to make the submissions worthy.

This also applies to directories, there are thousands of directories they can offer per submissions, ask them what is the percentage your links will be accepted on those directories.
If it's possible, try to ask whether they can submit to thematic directories, or even DMOZ.

You can also use services like article submissions, press releases, squidoo or hubpages creation, promotional video creation, etc.

There are lots of service providers out there, some are great and well some are crap.
It's important to find the good dedicated service providers but if you can it's also great to spread your link building campaign to several service providers.

It looks like Digg is going the nofollow way now anyway with their recent URL rewrite.

If you're looking to do some quick social bookmarking I would install onlywire on your browser (it's free). It's true not all of the services follow but it looks more natural if you have some nofollow links as well.

As for directories, yeah some are much better than others. The best - Yahoo, Dmoz, librarian's index etc all take ages to get into but are worth it. Watch out for ones that are covered in links to viagra sites etc. I think I've seen a few good lists of directories to submit to so have a look on here.

Hope this helps a little more.

Thanks for all the suggestions
Brian

Good luck on finding the service providers for your link building campaign,

If you're looking for providers from forums, you should check on the providers' histories, surely you want providers with good reputation and if possible no infractions.

I've had experience with a provider from other forums which has too many infractions and eventually banned by the forum.