Note: While developing a profile on one or more of these sites is a valuable tool in building your digital presence, nothing beats creating your own Website or blog in helping you sculpt your online career persona, your personal brand. Learn more in our article, SEO for Job-Seekers: 10 Tips for Building Your Brand and Being Found Online by Employers and Recruiters.

• LinkedIn.com -- a key social networking site for professionals from around the world, currently with more than 20 million members; a site in which you can promote your site and what you do, develop relationships with other professionals, and ask and answer questions.
• Facebook.com -- a social networking site that started out as a community just for college students but has now expanded to include everyone. The site is basically a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study, and live around them; it's a site in which you can promote what you're doing, keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people your friends meet.
• MySpace.com -- is a social networking site that consists of worldwide community of users who share information, photos, videos, music, and more. You could decide whether to create a personal MySpace profile or develop one for your business. Once you develop your page, you start finding and requesting others to be part of your network.
• Squidoo.com -- a social bookmarking site started by marketing guru Seth Godin, this site gives users a chance to showcase expertise in one or more areas by creating knowledge pages, called lenses… and the person creating each lens is, of course, called a lensmaster. Using this site gives you a chance to showcase your knowledge and link and promote your site.
• StumbleUpon.com -- is a social bookmarking site that consists of a fairly large community (5+ million) in which people share their Website likes and dislikes with other members of the community. When you become a member you build a profile of your activities and interests and can find others with similar profiles. In some ways, this site is like a personalized search engine – but instead of pages and pages of potentially useless results, users get results that have been approved by the community. Definitely a place in which you want to promote your site.
• Digg.com -- is a social news sharing for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. The process begins when a member of the community refers something (a Website, blog entry, podcast, video, etc.) to the community. Others in the community then rate the entry with "diggs." The more votes an entry receives, the higher it moves (even to the site's front page). By becoming a member of the community, you can then submit some of your site's key content.
• del.icio.us -- think of this social bookmarking site as simply sharing your personal bookmarks with an entire community of other people -- and where you can see what sites other people are bookmarking. Using this site allows portability -- so you can always find your favorite sites no matter where you are or what computer you're using, but it's also a chance to bookmark your own pages so that others in the community can find them.

Remember that if you plan to incorporate some of these social media sites into your Career SEO strategy that you must set aside time to stay active on these sites -- actually becoming a part of the community.

Find many more networking tools and ideas -- for networking both online and off -- in our The Art of Career and Job-Search Networking.