How to Optimize Your Company's LinkedIn Profile

Today's competitive market realities call for a powerful professional network that professionals can use to promote their personal brand. LinkedIn, one of the most widely used professional networking tools with 90 million active members in over 200 countries, offers its members the opportunity to capitalize on huge number of potential contacts and maximize their professional resources.

If you are a professional who signs up on LinkedIn, you can create your profile by adding truthful details about your working experience and education, point up your skills and competencies and request to be recommended on posted job positions from colleagues and supervisors in your network. Besides, you can join groups in your field of interest, look for professional service providers, contact recruiters, and socialize with your contacts on professional opportunities.

If you have a company profile on LinkedIn, you should expand your customer base by optimizing your LinkedIn profile for keywords pertaining to your business. Considering that the key success factor of LinkedIn is that it can offer you the opportunity to exponentially grow your network it makes good business sense to capitalize on SEO benefits.

In particular:

1. Employee Engagement

Your employees are your company. And your brand is the collection of your employees engaged in social media. The number of employees that use social media networks over the past couple of years has grown enormously. This means that you can effectively plan your brand management by turning your employees into brand advocates. Your employees work for you and they know you product. If you motivate them to advertise it by optimizing their social media profile you are very likely to win more customers at zero cost. The more employees you have with optimized personal profiles in line with your company's SEO standards, the more brand ambassadors you create. This can lead to winning more customers you win, who can recommend you to new customers.

2. Use appropriate keywords

In the context of SEO (search engine optimization), leveraging the suitable keywords can raise the visibility of your LinkedIn company profile in the major search engines. When people search for particular keywords or keyword phrases that pertain to your business, your LinkedIn company profile will appear high on the search engines. This will give greater exposure to your business and you will able to build brand awareness and increase your target audience. To achieve keyword optimization make sure that your profile description, summary and specialties contain keywords that could be used by people when looking for products or services relevant to your business.

3. Create a unique LinkedInURL

By default, LinkedIn creates a randomly-generated URL address that most likely will look like http://www.linkedin.com/pub/99/34b/000. However, you need to create a unique LinkedIn URL for your company that can drive traffic to your page and facilitate public search of your company. You can customize your public profile and enhance your brand by using your company's name as your URL. Alternatively, you can create a keyword-based URL that can help your company appear in major search engines.

4. Create uniqueanchor text links

Creating unique anchor text links to your company's profile ranks your LinkedIn company page high in major search engines. Your goal is to make your company's profile important to the search engines and this can happen if other websites are linked to your page. Just make sure to add your unique anchor text and link it to sites that don't use the Nofollow tag on outbound links. If you link to Nofollow sites, your company's page is very likely to be blocked as spam. More importantly, Google won't consider your LinkedIn company page as worth ranking and all outgoing links from your page will not generate leads.

5. Make your company profile public

This goes without saying, but if you don't make your profile public, you have probably wasted your time over nothing taking all the above steps. Setting your company's profile to full public view will facilitate people looking for your company to find you. Moreover, by being public, your company will be indexed in Google and Yahoo! Search engines, thus increases your odds of getting spotted and accessed by more people who will be looking for products and services pertaining to your business.

In conclusion, LinkedIn is a great networking tool provided that you use its potential to the maximum. It is entirely different than Facebook or Twitter, which both appeal to the masses rather than to professionals who seek for opportunities to expand their network. However, to get the full benefits of LinkedIn you have to optimize your company's profile to add value to your profile page and use LinkedIn as a valuable business resource.

Sources:

http://www.kristidaeda.com/2009/01/25/howto-linkedin-1-creating-your-unique-url/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/13-reasons-why-nofollow-tags-suck/4410/#ixzz1FrCxEFJe