Use LinkedIn to get Links… In…

I’ve been playing with LinkedIn a bit ever since I’ve been trying to do some VSO for my name and found that it does allow some opportunity for easy SEO/VSO.

Unfortunately, for me, it looks like Guy Kawasaki beat me to the punch with his post today. Fortunately, for you, his post is much more informative than what I would’ve wrote…

In Ten Ways to use LinkedIn, Guy starts off with a few fun facts:

• The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven.
• The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes.
• People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.
• All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.
• According to my inside sources, the person with the most pending LinkedIn invitations is…Guy Kawasaki. (Though I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of this factoid.)

He then goes on to list 10 11 ways you may benefit from using LinkedIn. My post would’ve concentrated on numbers 3 and 4 (minus any mention of “PageRank”):

3. Improve your Google PageRank.

LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.

To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.

4. Enhance your search engine results.

In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.

If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”

Easy one-way links from an authority domain, eh?

I’d be interested to see what happens when large companies get all their employees to create a profile and link to the company website using various anchor text.

However, I could see this feature being abused in the very near future. I’m sure individuals are already creating FlinkedIns (fake LinkedIn profiles… haha… ok, that was stupid ) for just this reason. It seems to work pretty well for me, so far.

Unfortunately, it will probably lead to the search engines devaluing the links and/or LinkedIn adding nofollows to all the links…

Anyway, add me to your network and check out Guy’s post for the rest of the tips!

CK Chung‘s

Lates!
—kid disco