So directories allow you to add your link to a page that has 50 – 100 – 200 other advertisers all in the same area. This often costs a reciprocal link or an annual fee. Why bother anymore when there are new technologies in play that give you the ability to, for the most part, control your own page on a site that doesn’t belong to you? Having the authority to only link to your website or blog and writing content for a page that doesn’t solicit your competitors services is a pretty useful tool for search engine marketing.

Blogging, Social Networks, Social Bookmarks and other user interactive sites have been spreading for a few years now. Take MySpace.com for an example; it started out without much competition and allowed people to post to their very own blog hosted on Myspace.com. Today it gets more daily traffic then Google.

Active Rain is considered a Social Network for real estate agents, Del.Icio.Us is considered a Social Bookmark site and You Tube is considered a Social Video site. Either way, they are all social and require interaction.

So yesterday I was working on link research for one of my clients. I decided to spend my time reviewing the linking practices of his competitors and came across one particular competitor that had a constant pattern amongst his many links. He had created for himself several Social Identities. I found that he had an Active Rain (AR), MyBlogLog, Del.Icio.us, and a ClaimID profile among a dozen or so more of these links.

I quickly noticed that he was neglecting a large amount of these Social Identities but he did provide a link or two to his main website from them so they were passing some link love. In addition to the link love to his website he appears to randomly be linking to a few of his other Social Identities. In this way he passes value to each of the Social Identity profile pages that in return pass greater link love to his main website. I imagine he isn’t linking all of them to all of them in order to avoid being looked at as a link farm.

So now I have a new direction to take when looking for links for my clients. However if this is helpful for one person then it should be helpful for others. My only advice is to not just create an account and let it sit unused. Take advantage of this marketing tool and build upon each of the Social Identities you’ve created. This will not only help search engines not devalue the empty page(s) but it can also encourage other Social Networkers out there to reference (link to) your social contributions.

Since yesterday I’ve started establishing five Social Identities that will work on promoting this Marketing Blog and maybe even pass some link love to client websites and other sites that I frequent often. The one I’ve spent the most time on so far is my ClaimID Social Identity. Bookmark it and keep watch with my progress over the next few months as I put this concept into play and build a case study.