Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile With Keywords

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile With Keywords

LinkedIn is a social media network, but it has a more professional and business like feel than Facebook Pages or Twitter. You complete your profile information and then spend time connecting to other like-minded individuals, or joining in groups and the Q & A to network and meet new people.

Because LinkedIn has more rigorous methods to contact people you will find that you check out profiles more often to determine if the other person is a good fit. For this very reason having a completed profile on LinkedIn is very important – it is your overall elevator pitch to other people; it is what will ‘sell’ you as a good contact on LinkedIn.

So… your profile says it is 100% complete, but is it really? Many people tend to use wording that you find in your resume or CV as a base for your profile content – which can be fine but you may be missing out on some aspects of profile completion that can help people find you. LinkedIn users do go to the search function and look for people with specific keywords. If you have created a profile that does not take into account any keywords that someone doing an online search would use… then you may be missing the boat.

What are keywords? They are words that people use to describe a business and how that business can help clients. Once you have these keywords you are ready to use them within your LinkedIn profile. There are five main areas I recommend incorporating them in order to get the most out of your profile and to help your name come up higher within online and LinkedIn searches.

1. Professional headline – This is an area where you have 120 characters to sell yourself. It’s like your 30 second elevator speech in which you describe who you are, what kind of people you help and how you help them. Write a sentence that tells people just this and incorporate the keywords.
2. Current position – Where you work currently and what you do. Use aspects of your resume but keep it short and include your keywords.
3. Past Positions – This may not always be a related type of work, but if you can include some keywords here it will help. Think how this position may have led you to your current one – were there any similar parts to the work? If so you can probably add some keywords.
4. Summary – This is where you can expound on your headline and add more content to give people a deeper picture of what your skills are. Work in some of those keywords.
5. Specialties – This is another area where you can get very detailed and specific on your talents and what makes people hire you. What do you bring to their business and why.

You should have a list of main keywords and then also supporting keywords – and post it on your wall where you can see it at all times. Use a combination of these words in the 5 areas above and people will find you. Don’t overuse the keyword – just add them in naturally. If you learn to incorporate them in all your online content, it will help your overall visibility as well.

Keep track of your effort by doing an online search yourself and seeing where you stand in the results. Then check regularly to see if your standings improve. If you are using a good combination of keywords in your online profiles, new online content, publishing blog posts and commenting on other blogs you will see a change – you should start seeing more and more of you in the search results.