How to optimise your LinkedIn profile (SEO Tips Included!)

How to optimise your profile

Include SEO-friendly links
One of the main ways that Google decides whether a website ranks highly or not is based on the number of (and the quality of) links to that particular website.
LinkedIn offers an excellent opportunity to create two high quality links to your website.
One of your links should be My Website and the other should be My Blog . For both of these, just link to the website you want to promote.
On the net, there are two types of links – ‘follow’ and ‘no-follow’ links. Follow links are the ones that are valued by search engines. My Website and My Blog are currently the only ‘follow’ links available on LinkedIn profile pages.

Include SEO-friendly links
To change the links displayed on your profile, log in to your account and click ‘edit’ next to the ‘Websites’ section. Your websites section should then look like this:
There is, of course, room for another link of your choice. It is up to you what you have as your last one. It won’t be valued by Google, but this doesn’t mean it won’t be valuable to someone viewing your profile.

Place most important information at top
Search engines ‘crawl’ web pages from the top down, and usually pay the most attention to content placed at the top of a webpage. The same rules apply to LinkedIn pages.
If you would therefore like a particular type of candidate to find your profile via a search engine, you can improve your chances by positioning the most important keywords higher up on your profile page.
This usually works quite well for niche/specialist terms. The Summary and Specialities sections are both good areas to include keywords.

The below extract is a good example of how you could place a number of keywords in your specialities section:
Here, another user has also used their ‘Professional Headline’ section to include multiple key phrases:

If you are struggling for ideas of which phrases to use, Google offers a useful ‘keyword tool’:
http://adwords.google.co.uk/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=1000000000&__c=1000000000&stylePrefOverride=2&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS#
Just type a relevant phrase into the top-left box, and it will return a number of potential keywords you could use.

Add a twitter profile to your account
LinkedIn and Twitter have become much more closely tied in recent times. LinkedIn now offers an excellent space to promote a twitter page – whether personal or for business - on your profile.
To publish your twitter account on your LinkedIn profile, just click ‘edit’ and enter the relevant account information.
Users have become highly adept at using a number of social networking platforms, so it is great if you can boost your presence across as many as you can and interlink them in this way.

More connections = more relevance
Although not confirmed by Google, there seems to be a strong correlation between the number of LinkedIn connections you have and where your profile appears in search results.
This appears to be one way that Google will prioritise one John Smith from 10,000 others. LinkedIn often sorts personal profiles in a similar way too.
This makes it important to boost your connections at every opportunity. If you have exhausted your personal connections, you could become a LinkedIn Open Networker ( LION ) by placing this description alongside your name. This will encourage users from across LinkedIn to connect with you.

More connections = more relevance NOTE: Becoming an Open Networker is a very good way of quickly gaining more connections, though this approach doesn’t suit everyone. Some users prefer their connections to be people they have previously met, spoken to or e-mailed. If you’d prefer to build more personal connections, you should offer your LinkedIn profile out by placing a link in your e-mail signature and mentioning it over the phone.

Lastly, join relevant groups
As you may already be aware, sourcing and becoming a member of relevant LinkedIn groups allows you to access the profiles of (and message) everyone else in that group.
It is worth joining a mixture of business and social groups to improve the visibility of your profile and increase the total number of people in your network.
It can be valuable subscribing to the weekly news updates for some of the larger groups. This way, you can see if there are any discussions over the course of the week that you may be able to get involved in.

Thanks for reading! Specialist Recruitment to the IT, Engineering, Commercial & Executive and Legal Professions This presentation was brought to you by:

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How to optimise your LinkedIn profile (SEO Tips Included!)

by IntaPeople (specialist IT recruitment agency) on Jul 07, 2010

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How to optimise your LinkedIn profile (SEO Tips Included!) — Presentation Transcript