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 Add Friend | LinkedIn, as a popular social media website with over 50 million professionals from around the world, not only works well for you to get a job or build up partnership, but also helps to improve website rankings and increase sales or traffic. Here's how it works: when high ranking websites link to your website, it improves the page rank of your website and in turn pushes up its ranking in search engines. LinkedIn is a site with a fairly high Google Page Rank, so if you have a good profile in LinkedIn and link your website to it, you are optimizing your website for search engines and in turn triggers more traffic.
Now, let us look at a few simple ways to optimize your LinkedIn account and increase its SEO value.
1. Complete your profile with keywords
LinkedIn displays a percentage score to show how complete your profile is. Try to fill out your profile completely with a professional photo and all relevant information. Use keyword-rich descriptions in profile headline, personal interests, summary, job title, career history, etc. For example, in your headline, put in the deapartment/group and company name instead of just writing the job title. "Marketing Officer of Social Media at WebPro & Web2.0 Blogger" is a good one with descriptive keywords that may help to attract relevant search engine traffic.
2. Anchor text with hyperlinks
LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to add three do-follow hyperlinks on your profile to websites of your choice. Instead of filing your links under pre-selected categories "My Website", "My Company", "My Blog" or "My Portfolio", you can file them under "Other". This way, you can create SEO friendly links with anchor text in target keywords.
3. Customize your URL
LinkedIn members have an opportunity to customize their profile URL instead of using the default one. This URL can be set to use your own name, the name of your company, or the name of your website. This will help you to optimise your name in the search engines and also makes it easier for people to link to your profile or remember it if promoted on business cards or email signatures.
4. Publicize your profile
LinkedIn allows you to publish your profile to the web. To make your profile information available for search engines to index, create a public profile and select "Full View". You can set which information to be publicly available for non-members. But be careful of not blocking too much information as this will be unavailable to the search engines as well. As a minimum, I suggest including your own name, company name, industry keywords and the three external links you have listed.
5. Register a company profile
LinkedIn company profiles rank high in Google search results. If your company still hasn't created a company profile, register it now! If your company has one already, encourage employees to create their own LinkedIn profile and ensure that they use a consistent company name in the current employer entry so that all employees listed on the company profile will be automatically updated. Finally, go to the "Companies" page and select "Add a Company". Your profile page is now established. Complete and correct the company information like website address, company logo, company description, financial information, etc. After some time, you will see the company profile rank in Google for a search on your company name.
6. Add connections
After optimizing your LinkedIn profile, it is time to increase its visibility. Connect with as many people as you can, current and former work colleagues, business partners, clients, friends, or anyone who share a similar interest. Increase the reach of your profile by adding a link to connect with you not just on Linkedin, but also on your website or other social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and many others. In doing this, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they search for someone as people within connections are at the top of LinkedIn search results.
7. Join related groups
You can establish more connections on LinkedIn by joining and participating in relevant alumni, industry, or professional groups. Within the groups, you can start discussions, comment on various topics, recommend readings, post job notices or events, and submit news articles. Every time you make contributions to a group, it will be updated via the Status feed which everyone in the group sees. This increases your profile visibility and helps you to get found by other industry professionals. And since you can post a link to the discussions and articles, it adds SEO juice to the link and more people out in cyberspace will reach your site.
8. Request recommendations
Ask the people who know you best to endorse you on LinkedIn. Having recommendations will help your profile to stand out and build trust in your reputation to visiting users. This will improve the visibility of your own profile within internal LinkedIn searches too. To get recommendations, you may consider recommending others first. Often, the people you recommend will recommend you in turn.
9. Add LinkedIn Applications
LinkedIn Applications enable you to enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective. For example, both applications "Blog Link" and "WordPress" synchronize your WordPress or TypePad blog with your LinkedIn profile. Whenever you update your blog with a post, the post is automatically displayed on to your Linkedin profile too. And the more connections you have to your profile, the more exposure your blog posts will get.
10. Use LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is a product that enables you to ask for advice. Here, you can ask business-related questions and receive high-value responses from the LinkedIn network. If you can provide professional answers, you showcase your expertise and build up your reputation within a field. It also builds the number of internal links pointing to your profile from within LinkedIn, therefore helping to strengthen your profile and thus your site in the search engines.
As you can see, LinkedIn does a good job on search engine optimization. So, build up your network in LinkedIn and take advantage of the features provided to improve the SEO of your website now.
Last Modification: Oct 05 2009, 07:24 AM Tags: LinkedIn, social media, social networking, seo, internet marketing |
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