For online B2B marketers, LinkedIn is one of the most valuable tools on the web. You should think of your Company’s LinkedIn Profile as having just as much importance as a page on your website and is the key to social business networking. You can leverage the authority of the Linkedin site to capture additional web traffic & leads that you otherwise wouldn’t reach. Here’s a comprehensive set of tasks you’ll want to complete in order to maximize LinkedIn for your company.
1. Encourage Your Employees to Join LinkedIn and To Link To Each Other
The key to building out your company’s LinkedIn network is to ensure that everyone is participating. By getting your employees to join and link to each other, you’ll grow your company’s network exponentially. This will give your salespeople greater leverage when they search LinkedIn for contact points to key customer targets.
2. Create a LinkedIn company profile
If you haven’t created a company profile on LinkedIn, do so. Having a LinkedIn profile for your company will allow prospective customers to see who they might know at your company when they are investigating whether they want to work with you or not–giving them visibility into who they can connect with might help close sales faster.
3. Include targeted keywords in your company’s profile
Because LinkedIn is an established and authoritative site, profiles on the site can often rank well quickly for searches. Adding keywords connected to the industry you work in can help your LinkedIn profile be established with those keyword landscapes on the search engines.
4. Personalize your LinkedIn Profile URL
Since you can decide what your URL looks like for your LinkedIn company profile, be sure to choose one that reflects your name or company name. Make sure your url in LinkedIn is personalized to your name or business name for both SEO and branding benefits.
5. Set your public profile to full view
When you sign into LinkedIn, you see a dashboard for your experience on LinkedIn. This is different from the public profile people see when they view your LinkedIn profile. You can control how much is displayed on your public profile. Choose “Full View” to display more content. The more unique content you choose to display, the less duplicate content you share with other profiles on LinkedIn. There’s also more content for the search engines to index and place in their rankings.
6. Link to your profile
Show the search engines how important your LinkedIn profile is by linking to it. This will help ensure that your LinkedIn profile will show up in the search engines when someone searched on your company name and other important keywords. Make sure you link to it from sites that don’t put the “nofollow” tag on outbound links. This means that simply linking from other social networks, which often employ the tag, won’t work. Instead, link from your site, your personal page, article sites, and any directories that allow you to place multiple links.
7. Using WordPress? Install the Wordpress app for LinkedIn
This application pulls in posts from your WordPress blog. This really adds value to your LinkedIn profile by providing even more content that distinguishes it from other profiles on the network. And while anyone can put keywords on their profile and make claims about their knowledge and experience, providing blog content that shows off your knowledge is proof that your profile is true.
8. Create unique anchor text for links
When you add links to your profile, you see a menu to classify the link. Choose “Other.” It gives you the option to add your own anchor text. These links are “nofollow,” meaning they won’t influence the sites they point to. However, by creating your own anchor text, it differentiates your LinkedIn profile from all the others – especially all the ones not using unique anchor text.
After you’ve optimized your profile, it’s time to make the most of the social networking aspects of LinkedIn. See our next post Linkedin Networking for tips on how to do that.
Any other ideas on how to maximize your LinkedIn profile? Share them with us.
