If you have been the owner of a website or a blog for any length of time, you're probably striving continuously to improve the SEO (search engine optimization) of your website. Let's face it; the more effort you put into SEO, the better your ranking will be on the various search engines, which in turn means your website will enjoy more traffic as a result.

Of course, even though you more than likely already use several social networking sites, you may not yet be sure of how much those sites can help improve your rankings. One of the best sites to take advantage of is LinkedIn. The main reason for this is that the site already enjoys phenomenal rankings due to the profiles which are hosted on it.

In the event that you already have a LinkedIn account then you can already begin improving your website's SEO with your LinkedIn account. In fact, let's take a look at a few simple ways for using LinkedIn in order to improve the SEO of your website or blog:

Step 1 - Make Use of Anchor Text and Links

Even though this is incredibly simple, it's of the utmost importance, if you want to increase the SEO of your site. You need to use anchor text in order to link to your website from your LinkedIn profile. When you create links to your various websites, it results in potentially profitable backlinks, and this is why it's important to use anchor text which makes use of specific keywords which are relevant to your website.

You need to bear in mind that major search engines such as Google will quite literally scrutinize anchor text when they rank websites. This of course means that if you had web site specific key words to your anchor text, your SEO will be vastly improved. In other words you need to avoid using names like "My Website" or George's Blog, but instead, you should try to be a little bit more creative.

Step 2 - Focus on Keywords When you Compose Your Profile

When you sit down to type up your LinkedIn profile, it's imperative that you focus on using the most relevant keywords. During the process you'll be required to include a headline, personal interests, summary, and also job descriptions and etc. Without over doing it, try to keep your profile rich with relevant keywords relating to your specific website or blog.

Step 3 - Adding Connections

The importance of using LinkedIn for adding connections simply cannot be stressed enough, particularly if your goal is to improve the SEO of your website. In doing this, you'll effectively be making your website more visible, bearing in mind that the more connections you have, the more visible your site will be to people out there in cyberspace. Over and above increasing your website's visibility on the LinkedIn site, you'll also be increasing the overall visibility of your own website or blog on the internet.


Step 4 - Customizing Your URL

Lastly but not least, you need to customize the URL which you have on the LinkedIn site, bearing in mind that LinkedIn members have an opportunity to customize their profile URL, rather than making do with the default one. In fact, you can even choose to change the URL to your own name, the name of your company, or even the name of your website. You can rest assured that if you do this it will result in your profile becoming far more visible, and this in turn goes a long way towards improving the SEO of your website.

Andrew Plimmer is CEO of Suncoast Internet, Sunshine Coast SEO, web design and web development specialists. For a free SEO analysis of your website go to =>
http://www.suncoastinternet.com.au/

Funniest writes: Great Sharing

20:43:34 Mon Dec 14 2009 CST


Vikas: Yoga Teacher writes: Thanks Sir, I have made up my linkedin profile as per your suggestions. Hope it work to promote my website

7:03:07 Fri Oct 30 2009 CDT


Ashwini writes: Humm. Nice write. But i say there is waste of money to spend on SEO company. Nothing happen to this. They not provide any BACKLINK which they promice b4 register. Install google analytic on your site. I sure u see 1 visit in 1week from seo site if your luck. Better u advertise on google adword or ask.

2:49:12 Fri Oct 23 2009 CDT


Patrick OMalley writes: I wrote a post similar to this at http://www.bostonseo.org/articles/63 and some people did make a comment about the "nofollow" attribute.

However, if you look at your Google webmaster tools, you'll see that Google does keep track of this as an inbound link, and Google woudln't keep track unless they were using it. Therefore, unless someone can prove that there is no benefit to it, it's certainly worth doing.

16:05:02 Mon Oct 12 2009 CDT


makemoney writes: Great article.. thanks for sharing

0:03:14 Thu Oct 8 2009 CDT


Loren writes: Thank you Andrew for sharing. I hope this will sure work to get good traffic and backlink also.

5:39:54 Wed Oct 7 2009 CDT


Asha writes: Thanks Andrew for a great post. I had already made the linked in profile URL as per my name. However using the anchor text for my blog and websites was not done. I did it just now :)

@Clinton, please select the option "Others" from drop down box and then you get a textbox to mention your anchor tag along with the URL texbox. Hope it helps.

23:52:27 Mon Oct 5 2009 CDT


bifung writes: thanks for the information

21:57:01 Mon Oct 5 2009 CDT


Matt writes: Great post, got my attention :)

Though linkedin offer anchor text for your sites within the public profile I'm not sure the search engines can actually crawl these links.

Though it can help with the user experience, giving them a greater idea about your sites, I don't believe this will have any effect on search rankings.

19:04:35 Mon Oct 5 2009 CDT


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