With SEO and IM there's two ways you can go. You can do blackhat and there's whitehat (I'd suggest doing both). Blackhat is basically using little tricks and holes in google's system to get you're site ranking high on their pages. You'll get results fast. Whitehat is the "moral" way to go about it and you won't break any of google's violations. when google removed Rapgenius from its search results it was because they were using blackhat techniques to get their shyt ranking. It really isn't that risky, I think the shyt rapgenius was doing was just really stupid and they're such a big site that google of course was going to have an eye on them.
Basically blackhat would be things like buying like fake youtube views, twitter followers, etc (this is very basic blackhat though).
Blackhatworld.com is the blackhat IM/SEO forum
Warriorforum.com is the biggest whitehat IM/SEO forum.

