Last week, LinkedIn celebrated its 13th birthday. It's
officially a teenager. With more than 414 million users, it's the largest
professional social network. And it's getting bigger by the day, making it the
biggest pool of talent online as well. When it comes to LinkedIn, we're all
little fishes in a big pond. Which means, if you want to be contacted about
great business and career opportunities through LinkedIn, you need to stand
out. However, that's where many users are making a critical mistake.
99 percent of users
fail to optimize their profile.
Most of LinkedIn's members don't know how to optimize the
content of their profile so they can be found. It all comes down to putting in
A) the right words, and B) the right amount of words. Here's why.
No keywords = no
visibility.
LinkedIn is a search tool. Just like Google, if you want to
find what you are looking for, you need to put in specific keywords to narrow
down the search results. For example, if I'm looking for a marketing
professional with social media experience, I would put in "marketing"
and "social media." The LinkedIn platform then searches through all
the candidates with those skill sets and looks at how many times those keywords
show up throughout their profile. This is known as "keyword density."
The more density you have for the search term, the higher up in the search
results your profile goes. (This quick video explains it all.)
Your headline is
prime real estate
In addition to keyword density, your headline is critical to
being found. If you have the keyword in your headline, LinkedIn sees you as an
even greater match and pushes you further up the search results. Thus,
placement of keywords matters as much as density.
And don't forget
those endorsements
Many people have dismissed the Skills & Endorsements
section of their LinkedIn profiles, assuming they don't really mean much.
Unfortunately, they're wrong. The number of endorsements you get for a skill
set counts toward your keyword density for that term. Therefore, the more
endorsements you have, the more likely you'll show up in the search results of
someone looking for that skill set.
If you build it, they
will come
Spending time optimizing your LinkedIn profile is worth it.
The more active you are on LinkedIn, the better your results will be. Remember,
the number of LinkedIn users is only going to grow, creating more competition
in search results. The longer you put off optimizing your profile, the lower
you'll show on the list--if you show up at all.
Source: inc.com
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