LinkedIn, the business networking website that allows you to stay in contact with your professional contacts, can do more than just that. It also can be used as a location to plug relevant links with relevant anchor text to your websites. So when you’re building links for your website (very important these days in SEO), don’t forget LinkedIn. How to do it ? Read on…
1. What is LinkedIn ?
According to Wikipedia, LinkedIn can be described as follows :
LinkedIn is a business-oriented networking site (comparable to a social networking site), mainly used for professional networking. As of November 2007, it had more than 16 million registered users, spanning 150 industries and more than 400 economic regions (as classified by the service). The main purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people they know and trust in business. The people in the list are called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a LinkedIn user or not) to become a connection.
2. How to prepare yourself ?
- First of all, you need a LinkedIn account. If you’re not registered yet, join here.
- Complete your profile. This is important because your profile page will be the one we’ll be using to plug links to our websites. Generally, your profile page will contain some content related to the websites you’ll be linking to. And as we all know, Google really likes links from pages containing similar content.
3. Create a public profile
LinkedIn offers the possibility to create a public profile that can be showed to non-LinkedIn members. You’re even free to choose the url of you public profile page. Most people use their name or nickname, but there’s no problem in using a few important keywords in your public profile url. Click “Edit My Profile” :
There you’ll find the possibility to create a public profile with a readable url :
Examples:
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/yournickname
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourcompany
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/your-main-business
Much easier to read than something like http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/3xy/199, isn’t it ?
4. Add your websites
And now the SEO possibility LinkedIn offers that most members seem to miss. No doubt you already added links to your profile. And no doubt the thought “Why just 3 links ?” crossed your mind. Chances are high you used the standard options LinkedIn offers to describe your website :
- My Website
- My Company
- My Blog
- My RSS Feed
- My Portfolio
DON’T ! Change it ! There’s a small option at the bottom you might not have seen :
Other is the way to go. When you pick other, you’ll notice you can choose the title (and anchor text) yourself. Choose the title of your website, the name of your company or some important keywords for your business.
5. Link to your public profile
Make sure you put a link online to your public LinkedIn profile on a well-indexed page. This will help boosting the ranking of your public LinkedIn profile, and as a consequence, the links on your profile will be worth much more.
Google likes LinkedIn, most pages have a nice PageRank, and so should your public profile (after a while…).
6. What do you have now ?
- 3 relevant links
- with the best anchor text we could come up with
- on a website Google really seems to like
And it just took you 5 minutes…
Not bad, taking in account the work you normally need for linkbuilding. Let me know what YOU think !
Excellent Info! I’ve used http://www.Boostviews.com ….they seem to do a decent job.
Hm, this sounds interesting, with a little bit of these and a little bit of that we get there somehow. LinkedIn for SEO, nice blog!
Interesting on Linkedin but I’ve not seen good results from that few links.
Compared to other SEO and inbound link acuisition strategies, using LinkedIn for SEO is a very weak method. I have never heard of it being useful for SEO tool, mainly because the link opportunities mentioned here are not publicly visible to search engines.