10+ suggestions for optimizing your LinkedIn profile

Millions of people use LinkedIn. In the Netherlands where I live over 2 million people use LinkedIn (The Netherlands has 17.000.000 citizens). Worldwide there are over 75 million users. If you connect to about 250 others, your 3th degree network will be over 2 million. But how can your profile stand out compared to so many other profiles? What good does it do to have a nice profile? Many books are written on this subject, but if it is up to me, you can just start with these simple suggestions for optimizing your profile.

 

 

Why should you create a profile?

A good profile helps you getting better SEO for your website. Furthermore it offers discussion forums, building an network or doing a background check on an applicant.

 

The suggestions…

 

Mind the profile language

The default language on LinkedIn is English.You can of course type any language you want but you can also create separate profiles fort each language you want to advertise yourself in. The only problem is, you can’t delete a secondary language profile. Read how to create more profiles here. I sure hop I can delete this warning on day (Come on LinkedIn!)`.

 

Basic Infotmation

Sometimes some writes his connections in his last name. This is because LinkedIn stops numbering your connections when you are over 500. How pathetic is that. The meaning of LinkedIn is far beyond having as much connections as possible. You have to actually know the people in your connection list and engage with them! Just put your name in there and don’t put your cell phone number in your name as well (unless you’re Dwight Schrute). Choose the industry you work in, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the industry your company is in. If you are an accountant at a pizza franchise, your industry will be accounting .

 

Professional “Headline”

You can brag a bit here. Think of a cool name for what you do that emphasizes your skills. Make sure the skills you claim you actually have but there is nothing wrong with claiming knowledge about something you had a training in or put a lot of effort in.

Experience

Here you enter your official job description. Make sure you connect to your actual employer. If not you will not be found. Maybe there is no company profile for your organization yet. You can create one if you have an email alias in the domain.

You can add several employers. Also you can enter board memberships. Add your most important job last so it will be ranked on top on LinkedIn

You can also add previous experience which will make it easier for other people to find you.

 

Education

The same goes for education. You can enter as many schools as you want and the most important colleges and universities are already listed on LinkedIn. Mentioning you primary school is only useful if you want to get back in touch with classmates.

 

Public profile

Your profile has a really long incomprehensible ID that doesn’t make sense at all. (Mine is  http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?locale=nl_NL&id=29511555&trk=tab_pro). THerefore you can create your own URL like mine (which is in Dutch): http://nl.linkedin.com/in/sigurdfelix.

 

Email addresses

You can have as many  email addresses linked to your profile as you want. This way people can easily find you in there mail client’s contact list. I suggest you use a private mail address with Yahoo, Gmail etc. as your primary address so invitations aren’t deleted by spam filters.

 

Additional information:

 

Web Sites

First of all, change every website to ‘other’. Now you can make a description for the website which will be found on Google. ‘My Company’ doesn’t do that. Don’t link to a blog but use a Linkedin Application to promote your blog on your LinkedIn profile

  

The End

Don’t change everything at once. If you change a part of your profile once a week, you’ll be in everyones network update all the time. If you change everything at once, people will block your updates.

I liked gathering information for this blog post (or translating it from my Dutch post this time). If you don’t agree with a suggestion, or you have one yourself, feel free to comment so we can engage in conversation.