Basic Tips To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Are we connected on Linked In?


Linked In in my opinion, is one of the few social media websites every professional should be using. There are many advantages to using LinkedIn. Plus unlike many sites where it can be time-consuming to build up and maintain a popular profile, LinkedIn requires far less effort. You can obviously use it more frequently if you’d like, but it’s not as necessary as it would be for other social media sites.


So once you’ve signed up and registered your account, here’s ten tips I recommend to optimise your account:


Fully complete your profile


Ensuring that this contains all relevant career history and interests. LinkedIn makes this easy by displaying a percentage score to show how complete your profile is.
A LinkedIn profile basically acts as an online CV, so make sure you’re being honest and describing yourself and career clearly.


Edit profile to claim vanity URL


This should be set to use your name (or closest match if unavailable) within the URL, for example: www.linkedin.com/in/kevingibbons – this will help you to optimise your own name in the search engines and also makes the URL easier to remember if promoted on business cards or email signatures.
Make your profile publicly available – You can set the information which is publicly available to non-members/contacts, be careful with blocking too much information as this will also be unavailable to the search engines. As a minimum, I would recommend providing enough information for the search engines to index your profile and cache the external links you have listed! In terms of optimising your profile, the main goals are normally to rank for your own name, company name and possibly industry keywords related to this.


Make connections


Increase the reach of your profile by connecting with current and former work colleagues, clients, friends and family. I’d also recommend adding any industry contacts, perhaps from people you have met at conferences/events or are connected with on other social media sites and share a similar interest.


Request recommendations


Obviously don’t ask everyone, especially if you don’t know them that well. But having recommendations will help your profile to stand out and will help to build trust in your reputation to visiting users. This will help improve the visibility of your own profile within internal LinkedIn searches too.


Register a company profile


If your company doesn’t already have a company listing, you should create one! Here’s an example of the SEOptimise company profile, if your company does have a profile, you should encourage employees to create their own individual LinkedIn profile’s and ensure the current employer entry is completed. This will automatically update all employees listed on the company profile, providing the company name is exactly matched.


Make use of the 3 website hyperlinks


For SEO value, LinkedIn is very good – they give you the opportunity to add three hyperlinks to websites of your choice. If you’re not trying to optimise your site for “My Website”, “My Portfolio” and “My Blog” it might be an idea to select “Other” and choose your own anchor text instead!


Join related groups


Find groups where other industry professionals have joined and look to participate in (or at least join) these groups. Adding value to your own profile and helping you to get found by other industry contacts.


Use LinkedIn Answers


This can help to build up your reputation within a field. For SEO it also builds the number of internal links pointing to your profile from within LinkedIn, therefore helping to strengthen your profile in the search engines!
Optimise your job title –
LinkedIn now includes your job title within profile title tags. I’m not saying you should lie about your job, but within reason you could include descriptive keywords which may help to attract relevant search engine traffic. For example, using “SEO Account Manager” as a job title instead of “Account Manager”, if appropriate.

Why Bother Networking? Is It Worth It?

What Is Networking?


Networking is a common term today within any industry. It can have two meanings – the process of linking computers and other devices together so they can communicate, and the process of meeting and talking to other people to help your career. This article is about the latter.



Networking is the process of meeting people, talking to people and getting to know them, with a long term aim of helping your career. It’s done by a lot of people and it’s good to know what’s involved and why you need to do it.

Why Should I Network?


One of the most popular phrases in the working world (which you’ve probably heard before), is the phrase “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. This means that knowing and associating with the right people can be more important than what you know or what you do. It aims to remind you of the importance of people skills and networking.


There are many reasons why networking is a good idea:


Keep informed of career opportunities in your industry
Learn about ideas and trends in the industry
Meeting new people
Understand more about other areas
Developing your communication and listening skills
If you’re considering a career change, or looking for new opportunities for a promotion, you should be looking to network whenever and wherever you can. You don’t always get a promotion or change that’s just handed to you – you need to be able to find out where they are and take your own steps to get there.


How Can I Network?


Well, the answer to this is to get out there and talk to people. You can do this at work, at social events, at different meetings, wherever people in your industry or workplace are together. You don’t even need to be in a group situation – you could be talking to a single person.


Essentially, you make conversation with people and get to know them. It doesn’t always have to be work or business related – it can be a personal conversation. However, you need to know why you’re networking and why you’re there, in order to have an appropriate conversation.


How Can I Get Better at Networking? 

There are a few things you can do to be more effective at talking to colleagues. Some of these could be:


Think of the reason you’re meeting people. Is it to find out what’s happening in your company? Are you looking for any new job offerings? Or something else? Knowing why you’re there will help your discussions.
Networking is about being mutually beneficial to both people. Realising what you have to offer is a good thing to do.
Get a business card made for yourself, if you don’t have one already. It should, at the very least, have your name, email address, and phone number on it.
Practice your “soft skills”, which include listening, body language, and conversation skills. These come with practice and experience – in a future article I’ll write about how you can do this.


Hope this article helps with your networking. What are your thoughts? Post your replies in the area below.

Key Questions To Ask When Networking For A New Job

The Number One Thing To Remember When Networking Is...People Have A Favorite Topic Of Discussion – Themselves!

It truly is not about you. It is more about the other person.


Ask questions, find their interesting story, learn from them, ask advice. Strive for a conversation that is 25% you, 75% them.

• Remember your manners. Smile a lot. Say please and thank you. Hold doors open. Make eye contact. Say “and” more than you say “but.” Be positive. These are the things your mom taught you.

Looking For A New Career, Here's A Start!

Money. It’s a topic that’s inspired countless songs about its correlation to happiness and health, from the Beatles classic “Can’t Buy Me Love” to the ’90s hit “Mo Money, Mo Problems” by Notorious B.I.G.

While the universal message of these songs is that making tons of money won’t solve all of your problems, most people would be content with earning a decent salary so they can pay their bills, support their family and live comfortably.

Since every worker has his own idea of what his target income would be, we like to highlight jobs at different pay levels and across different industries. Here we’re looking at jobs that pay a median of $45,000 a year, which is approximately $20,000 more than the 2010 median annual pay for U.S. workers of $26,364. Median means half of workers made more and half made less.

Here are nine jobs that pay around $45,000*: