LinkedIn now has more than 332 million registered usersmaking it easily one of the leading social media sites out there for businesses. Naturally, this has a lot of spillover consequences that can help businesses get ahead. For example, nine in ten recruiters use LinkedIn to find job candidates, and many B2B companies are actually finding customers through LinkedIn. With this in mind, it’s clear that there is a very large potential audience at your fingertips if you use this platform correctly and spend time optimizing your company profile.
14 SEO Tips to Boost Your LinkedIn Profile
Fortunately, there are several basic SEO tips and changes that you could be using to greatly increase your professional presence on LinkedIn in order to appear in search results more often. Furthermore, the goal is also to have your company name come up for more relevant positions in LinkedIn searches and Google searches.
And so without further ado, below are 14 SEO tips to help you get started, from the newest information available in summer 2015:
Use a custom profile URL
When you initially sign-up, your LinkedIn URL will contain mostly random letters and numbers. In order to reap the SEO benefits, it is recommended that you change it to your full name (the one you use on your profile). If for some reason that is already taken, alternate forms of your company name, such as initials or abbreviations, still work great. The end-goal is to get a URL that is identified as yours. You can learn about how to create a custom URL here.
Use Anchor Text in Links
LinkedIn provides the opportunity to list up to three links within your profile. The options that the site recommends include “Company Website” and “Blog,” but unfortunately, these are often not very SEO-friendly. One way to optimize for SEO is to customize the anchor text in your URLs by selecting the “Other” option. Then, you can use an alternate keyword-rich title to describe your links and help set you apart from the rest.
I know what you’re thinking—keyword-rich anchor text is a bad thing. While this is true when it comes to Google search, this is not the case for the LinkedIn algorithm!
Have a Complete and Finished Profile
This seems to be stating the obvious, but it is still very apparent to me that many people do not fully complete their LinkedIn profiles when they set them up. So many profiles look like they just weren’t given the time that they needed, and what does that say to a potential employee? Here are some things that are a must for your profile:
- Add a professional-looking photograph (more on this later).
- Fill in the summary section.
- Ask for and give recommendations.
- Include samples of your work.
While some will focus heavily on doing these things for their individual profiles, company profiles always seem to miss some of these features. While giving recommendations or including samples of your work may not be the first thing you think of when it comes to representing your company, they’re still great options that can give you that extra edge.
Use Keyword Rich Job Titles
Make the best use of your job titles for SEO—surprisingly, it will give you a definite advantage over those who do not. Of course, do not provide false information or try to embellish what a job entails, but be as descriptive as possible about what is expecting of the future employee. Optimizing your job titles slightly to include a few keywords is a strategy that will definitely help you appear in more relevant searches.
Optimize Your Job Descriptions
Similarly, you also want to optimize your job descriptions. Rather than going the route of wiring paragraphs, it is generally best to use a variety of relevant keywords in bullet-pointed, short-description lists. The end-goal is to make the information in these descriptions both accurate and easily scanned.
Expand Your Network
You want to be connected to as many people on LinkedIn as possible. Think about it this way, if your LinkedIn network is one-fourth the size of your Facebook connections, it is probably time to search your email contacts. While you obviously use different social media outlets for different purposes, it is good to have as many connections on your profile as possible, even if they extend beyond your industry.
Have Solid Ties and Group Membership
One of the best things that you can do for your LinkedIn profile, is to join and participate in relevant groups. Your participation won’t just increase your network size, but it can also improve your profile’s SEO. Once you join, the group names will appear on your profile. This information will require search engines to crawl the titles and learn more about who you are and what groups and ideas you are associated with. Thus, joining industry-relevant groups will improve the keywords on your profile, and local groups can help with geo-targeted SEO.
Something additional to consider: Many of the groups found on LinkedIn are filled with active experts who are really interested in interacting with other people and helping out with industry-related questions and discussion. Take some time to actively participate by asking and answering questions. Helping and answering questions is a great way to contribute and it gets you noticed. Aside, from optimizing SEO, in general, you should take any opportunity you can to network and learn even as a company.
Promote Your LinkedIn Profile Elsewhere
In the days of cross-utilization of social media accounts, you should definitely put a link to your LinkedIn profile on your email signature, your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ accounts and any websites you maintain to create inbound links.
Upload samples of your work
Depending on your industry, unique samples of your work can help others get idea of your capabilities and it can set you a part from others in your industry. Thus, if you have videos/presentations/publications that qualify your expertise, share it. Here’s how.
Recommendations
Just as employers want to hear professional recommendations before hiring someone, reaching out to past and present colleagues for public reviews on your LinkedIn profile is one way to demonstrate why your company is so great before even being asked for references.
Interact with Your Community
Let’s face it: Building a well-established profile and then letting it sit there is pretty much pointless. Use it to interact with others and establish yourself, even after you have filled a position you were after. Continue to publish articles and status updates, interact with others in your industry and make yourself prominent.
Self-Promote
As we all know, visibility and content marketing go hand in hand. Ultimately, there is know way of specifically linking SEO benefits to self-promoting on LinkedIn, but it is definitely worth the visibility benefits. Do you have a new eBook or a new blog post? Post them to the site and others will surely take interest and earn you some clicks, especially since many of your contacts are likely to be in your field.
Upload A Picture and Cover Photo
Again, another obvious point that must be mentioned. Upload a picture, even if for no other reason than making sure that people know who they are looking for. It is strongly recommended that you choose to use the same picture that you do for your other social media platforms (Google +, Twitter, Facebook, etc), which will help keep things consistent and improve brand recognition.
Be Strategic
When you are putting together your profile, you want to be strategic. Make sure that everything that you are uploading and selecting to share tells a consistent and comprehensive story about your company. Pay attention to using keywords in titles, as this is one of the most important elements of SEO. Again, make sure you are being complete and not leaving blank spaces. Universities do incredibly well at this and it does help their SEO, which you can learn more about here.
Do you have experience with buffing up your LinkedIn profile and improving your SEO? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments section below.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1Jo9Srr via transformational marketing
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1JqCG4V
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