Optimize Your Profile
YOUR LINKEDIN QUESTIONS ANSWERED!
Do you have questions about your LinkedIn profile or how to use LinkedIn? Send your questions to our LinkedIn Expert Debbie McCormick and she’ll answer them in the magazine! Use info@LinkedInBossLady.com with subject Dear Debbie.
Dear Debbie:
I hear and read about “profile optimization” all the time. What does that mean? ~ Julia P.
Thank you for your question, Julia.
People who spend their days steeped in marketing, specifically for me LinkedIn, sometimes forget that we use words that don’t have an everyday meaning, or that have a particular meaning in the marketing space and nowhere else.
Oxford dictionary says the word optimize means:
make the best or most effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource).
To optimize a LinkedIn profile means to use your strongest keywords in the right places in the profile so that the search engine spiders can easily match you with someone who is searching for someone who does what you do.
I’m happy to translate that into English for you.
Let’s start with keywords: keywords are the same thing as search terms, but when used within a profile or website, they’re called keywords.
Keywords = search terms.
Keywords are the phrases that describe what you do.
Example: I am an LinkedIn speaker and trainer, so two of my strongest keywords are LinkedIn trainer and LinkedIn speaker.
Say you were in charge of booking speakers for a business convention, and you wanted to book a LinkedIn pro to speak at your next convention. One of the ways you might find that someone is to do a Google or LinkedIn search for the phrase LinkedIn speaker. That would be your search term.
Now let’s look at my profile:
If my profile has the phrase/keyword LinkedIn speaker in the places where the search engine spiders primarily look to match up search terms to keywords, then my profile is optimized and will come up in your results … which would be a really good thing, since that’s what I do. 😃
Keywords are how you are found by the search engines …they must be the same phrases someone would use to search for you.
Not only do my keywords have to match the search terms used to look for someone like me, I must put all of my strong keywords in those places the spiders concentrate on.
Happily, they’re very straightforward:
Profile headline (the area right below your profile photo that most people mis-use). You have 220 characters here, so a lot of space for everything.
In the body of the About section (the 2000-character section just below your photo). You can also use them as hashtags at the bottom of the section, but remember they’ll be counted as part of your 2000 characters.
In the headline (100 characters) and body of your current job in the Experience section (2000 characters). Again, use them as hashtags below the body of the section.
In your Skills list toward the bottom of your profile. You’re allowed 50 skills, but only the first three show until the reader clicks See More.
