SEO experts realize that one of the keys to elevating your ranking in Google search results is to have highly respected sites point to your web pages through links.  In this article, I will explain how to change your LinkedIn profile to improve the ranking of your web pages.  I assume that you understand the concept of “anchor words”. 

LinkedIn is a very well respected site, having a Google page rank of 8 for their home page and a page rank of 3 for many profile pages.  Therefore, if you have a profile in LinkedIn, you should make sure that you set up anchor words for the web pages that you reference in your profile, since you can now specify the anchor words. 

The most obvious thing to do is to set up the 3 web sites in your LinkedIn profile so that they point to your work web site, your personal web site, and your blog, or what ever 3 sites you want to promote.  To do this, log into LinkedIn, look at your profile, and follow these instructions: 

1. on the left navigation bar, expand Profile
2. click Edit My Profile
3. in the bottom center of the screen, click Edit after any one of the websites, and you will be taken to a page where you can change all 3 website pointers

 
Many smart SEO experts realized this early on, and set all 3 to point to their web pages, but LinkedIn used to be “hard coded” to use the phrases 

• My Company
• My Website
• My Blog

 
so they chose those three.  Now, you can actually set up your own anchor words for your sites by doing the following: 

• Edit your web site area in your LinkedIn profiles, but select Other from the drop down box, and put in your own anchor words in the box to the right of it
• Click Save Changes at the bottom
• Verify that the link works by clicking on the links

 
You can see an example of how I did it if you click on Patrick O’Malley’s LinkedIn Profile.  Notice that I set up my anchor words to be 

• LinkedIn Speaker Video
• LinkedIn Training
• Missing LinkedIn Tips Blog

 
This helps me rank at the top for “LinkedIn speaker” out of 1.2 million matches.  I just added the keyword for “LinkedIn Training” recently, and am the 10^th-14^th match, depending on whether you use quotes with the search.  I just began the blog in late January, but it is climbing.  By the time you read this, it may be higher. 

By the way, you can also set up links at MySpace, Facebook, and other social media sites, although many of them don’t currently allow you to specify your own anchor words.  

In summary, LinkedIn gives you a great opportunity to create quality web links to your site with anchor words that you get to choose.  It should only take 10 minutes of your time, and is certainly worth it. 

Good luck.

Patrick O’Malley loves and lives LinkedIn, but that doesn’t mean he’s boring. His bizarre excitement about it can be seen in a 2 minute video at http://www.patrickomalley.com

LinkedIn for SEO is a post from: Boston SEO