Updated: 2/12/13
In an ideal world, job seekers would be recruited for a position without having to send out hundreds of resumes, recruiters would quickly be able to narrow their search down to a few of the most relevant candidates, and throngs of customers would come to you and beg to do business with you. With LinkedIn, this ideal is quickly becoming a reality. I found my current job doing Social Media at Vistage International through LinkedIn. Someone at Vistage sent me a LinkedIn message saying, “I came across your profile and I’m in the market for somebody young and talented on the web to be my right hand guy here at Vistage International. If you have a few minutes, let’s chat.” I was hired soon after, and a year and a half later, I’m still happily working at Vistage.
In this article I’ll walk you through various tips to optimize your profile for success on LinkedIn. Whether you’re the CEO of your company, just entering the job market or in an entry to mid-level role, these tips will increase your personal branding and visibility on LinkedIn:
- Your Profile Picture: It is important to have a recent profile picture (a picture taken within the last two years). The picture is the first impression that someone is going to have of you and the only image that represents who you are. If you’re the CEO, you might want to have a picture of yourself in a suit; an artist may want to have a picture that captures his or her creative side, etc. Having the same picture on multiple social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ will help build your personal brand.
- Your Professional Headline: Remember, your professional headline will be the first thing that someone sees in a message or connection request, so it’s important to have a headline that clearly represents what you do. There are two ways that I’ve found to do this effectively:
a. Write a headline that displays all the different titles that someone is likely to search for on LinkedIn to find you. For example: Social Media Marketing Consultant | Social Media Trainer| SMO | Blog Marketing | Internet Marketing Specialist because these are the titles that someone would most likely be searching for to find someone with my expertise.
b. Write a descriptive headline that illustrates what you do with keywords filtered in. For example: Marketing strategist that specializes in growing revenue through strategic partnerships and digital channels (There is a 120 character limit).
- Share an Update: It is important to stay relevant in the eyes of whatever audience you are trying to reach. Share updates that display thought leadership in whatever field you’re in. On average you would want to update this 1-3 times per day. The benefit to you is that your update will appear on your connections’ newsfeed and if the article resonates well with them, they are likely to visit you or your profile for more information. Hint: A great place to find new content is on LinkedIn Today; you can customize LinkedIn today to get articles that interest you based on the publications you read or by topics.
- Work Experience (Current and Past Positions): Your job title is important because there are many different variations of titles that someone might be searching for on LinkedIn. If you only include one variation or keyword, it might be hard for someone searching to find you. If you’re a CEO, someone might be searching for President, Founder, Managing Partner, Owner, etc. You may want to use something like: President and CEO of _____ Company. The description is a great place to put your job responsibilities and accomplishments.
- Education: Filling out your education information is important because many people have a strong affinity to the college or university they attended. Many people who don’t normally connect with people they don’t know on LinkedIn will connect with alumni from the same college or university.
- Getting Recommendations: It is important to have at least three recommendations from co-workers, people you manage, or clients. Recommendations now appear right below your job description for a certain position. LinkedIn does not require 3 recommendations anymore to get to a 100% complete profile however I still think this is best practice.
- Adding Websites: When adding websites, always select the option “Other” because it will give you another field to enter a description of your website. “Personal Website” doesn’t describe what someone would be clicking; adding a detailed description will help increase traffic to your site from your LinkedIn profile.
- Editing Your Public Profile URL: It is important to create a custom URL for your page. You will most likely want to use your full name when you customize this because you want to optimize your page for search results in Google. Also, creating a custom URL will make it easier for you to share the link with friends, employers or co-workers.
- Adding Your Summary: The summary is a biography of your work history. This can consist of all of your accomplishments throughout your career and a brief overview of what you’ve done that has led you to where you are in your career now. This is also the section where you can add the most content to your profile, so it is important that you utilize it. Filter the keywords that you would want to be searched for throughout this section as well in a creative way to help optimize your profile for search
- Adding to your Skills & Expertise Section: The skills and expertise section is becoming increasingly more important to your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn made a change last year that now requires you to have 3 skills added to your profile in order to get to 100% profile completeness. You are allowed to add up to 50 skills to your profile and I’d recommend adding all 50 of them if possible. Recruiters are using skills to find people that match a specific criteria and they are likely searching for a specific set of skills as opposed to a specific job title. To get to this section, hover over “More” in the top navigation of LinkedIn next to the search bar and select “Skills & Expertise” from the list. Enter in a skill in the search box and wait for the list of populated skills to come up. As an example, type in “leadership.” As you’re typing you should see a list of related skills to “leadership.” Click whichever one would apply to you and when you get taken to the page for that skill, hit the blue “Add Skill” in the lower left side of your skill box. Go back to edit profile mode of your profile and you should see a new section if you scroll down that says “Skills.”
- Getting Endorsements: I get two questions about endorsements most often. What is the difference between an endorsement and a recommendation and why should I be worried about endorsements? The difference between an endorsement and a recommendation is that an endorsement is just someone “endorsing you” or letting everyone on LinkedIn know that they believe you are a valuable resource for a specific skill. A recommendation is a written recommendation for you in a specific role. The reason why getting an endorsement is important to you is because as you get more endorsements for a specific skill, it is more likely that you’ll come up in the search results when someone is searching that skill. For example: I have 58 people who have endorsed me for Social Media Marketing so when someone searches for people with the skill social media marketing in my area, it is likely that I will come up somewhere on the first few pages of the search results.
- Adding Sections: Although LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to add third-party applications to your profile anymore, they do still have valuable sections that you can add to your profile such as courses, patents, publications, certifications and more. To get to these additional sections, click on edit profile and on the right hand side you will see a list of available sections that you can add to your profile.
What does it take to get to 100% profile completeness?
Tracking Your Success
So now you might be wondering, “How do I know that the changes I made are helping people find my profile?” When you’re on your home screen or in edit profile mode you’ll see a box on the right hand side that says “Who’s Viewed Your Profile.” Click into that, and after filling in all of the information to your profile, you can monitor the appearances in search results over the next couple weeks to see if there is an increase. The higher your appearances in search, the more optimized your profile is for the keywords you are targeting.
(UPDATED) If you have a premium account, you will be able to see more data on how people are viewing your profile. Here is a screenshot from my keyword data that shows how effective my page is at targeting keywords relating to social media. 
Takeaways from this visual:
1. More people find my page through keywords than they do typing in my name. (I would’ve expected more people to find my page through typing in my name. However, this is great because it means what i’m doing is working.)
2. My appearances in search has been dropping so I might need to go back to my profile and try optimizing my page for different keywords that more people are searching for. (It’s an ongoing process)
By following this guide to a complete profile, I hope you see success in increasing your visibility and personal brand on LinkedIn.
If this worked for you or if you have success stories from being on LinkedIn, please share your story in the comments below. If you found value in this article please share it with your peers!
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Featured Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheilascarborough/
I Agree.. Slide share might also fit into the check list
Slideshare is a great application, I also use WordPress, My Travel and if you want to add video to your profile here’s a how-to article by Amy Porterfield: http://www.amyporterfield.com/2011/07/how-to-add-video-to-your-linkedin-profile/
Brilliant post Benji. Great actionable tips I can and need to implement right away.
Great article. I’ve shared this with my sales team and encouraged them to use it as a template for their LinkedIn profiles.
Thank you for your article. Not only was it informative, but it should cause people to re-evalute their own sites to ensure optimal usage…again, thank you
Of course, glad it helped!
thank you Mr. benji …wish you all the best
Very useful post. Thankyou for the tips. I have made some changes to my LinkedIn profile now.
Great! What changes did you make? Make sure to monitor the changes you made in your appearances in search and see if what you did affects how people search for you on LinkedIn.
This article was very helpful and clear in its examples and discussion of each section of the profile. I have questions regarding your statement that a person should share updates. I was beginning to figure this out. However, what kinds of updates should a person share, if they are not currently working? How personal should the updates be? And is it possible to share links in their updates to articles they’ve been reading to show that they’re staying current?
Abigail,
Thanks for the questions. I would share updates that are related to whatever industry you are in (new tools, industry news, etc.)- even if you aren’t currently working. A great place to find articles is in the LinkedIn today section, you can get there by hovering over ‘news’ in the top navigation of LinkedIn and selecting ‘LinkedIn today.’ LinkedIn today compiles the most shared articles from the top news sources by industry.
The updates should prompt a response from your connections. A great way to do this would be to ask a question to your audience, for example “I really like this new tool that just came out, what do you think?”
Also, I say that you should share updates 1-3 times a day. That is because I am very active on LinkedIn and have a lot of connections. If you have less connections (around 100) then I would recommend only sharing updates a few times a week as newer users to LinkedIn might find 1-3 updates a day excessive. It’s really all up to you but I would test sending more updates one week and less another and see how your connections react.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
-Benji
I have forwarded this to more than a dozen people and every single person has gotten back to me with an “a ha” moment. This is an informative and concise summary which is very helpful. Do your friends and colleagues a favor and share this article with them.
Thanks for the feedback Victoria! What were the common things that your colleagues were missing?
This was a great post Benji, well laid out and good pics along with it – and I also made a change to my LinkedIn. A colleague was asking me about something like this just a couple days ago – so, are you a psychic? haha …
Benji – Thanks for a well written - and nicely comprehensive – overview for LinkedIn users. Having screenshot examples really makes it come ‘alive’.
I created a BitLy URL for this article and passed it along to 20 members of a weekly busines reoundtable group that I am a part of.
Thanks again!
Brian Hoffman
Thanks Brian!
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Great information!
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Looks like I need to go back and make a few modifications to my profile page… Thanks for providing such helpful information along with including snapshots of each feature addressed to make it easier to understand. Greatly appreciate it!
Thanks Benji for sharing such valuable tips. I run a networking for women and I am always pushing the value of Linked In and how it helps you brand yourself in the marketplace. I will share the tips with them in your name of course.
Benji – thanks for some very good suggestions. My only disagreement with you is that I do not think it’s necessary or even desirable to put so much detail about specific job responsibilities. I save that for my resume. I still think readers can get a good snapshot of my abilities from my Profile.
Melanie
The reason why it would be important to put your specific job responsibilities in your profile is because when someone searches for you on LinkedIn it pulls keywords from all parts of your profile including job descriptions. There are only a few spaces on your profile where you can add content- your summary, specialties, job descriptions, etc. If you don’t have job descriptions filled out for each of your positions you are losing out on valuable space on your profile.
Great post! Thank you for the tips!!
I applied serveral of these things to my LinkedIn profile and within a week I received an invitation for a job interview. Although I’m happy with my current employment with TrendSource, this just shows the power of fully utilizing your profile capabilities. Thanks again.
Nice! Congrats!
Read a large number of posts on linkedin on optimising your profile etc & think this has to be one of the best, informative pieces out there! The screen shots work well and all points backed up with reasoning and examples. I use linkedin a lot, with a large number of connections and thought I had a real good grasp on it all, but just spent half hour on my profile putting a few things right and will be doing so on a weekly basis from now on! Good write up Benji, Thanks
Thanks for the feedback Nick, I’m glad you found it useful!
Great article Benji. I’ll tweet this link for you today.
Thanks Malcolm
Very informative article with excellent examples. Thanks for sharing your experience Benji!
Quite helpful-Thank you.
Great article! Thanks for the post.
Great article, Benji! I’m putting it into action right now!
Great article Benji. Thanks for the time put into it. I changed my websites to have custom names. Had thought it was kinda lame that they said Blog, My Company & My Company. Didn’t realize that was possible.
Great to hear!
Very helpful! Thank u for sharing!
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If you customize your url after you have connections, do you lose existing connections?
Really interesting, especially for the part abot endorsement for me
What is your suggestion for someone who is attempting to transition from one field to another? For instance I’ve worked in Public Health Management, but would like to transition to HR. I have a 2nd Master’s in HR and have had HR related responsibilities my entire career, though they may not have been done on a daily basis, I was responsible for doing them.
Charlotte,
I would recommend adding HR skills that you think you have to your LinkedIn profile. Then I would edit your job descriptions to highlight the HR related responsibilities. Make sure your masters is highlighted under your education and also change your headline to reflect what you’re looking for or your strengths in HR.
Hope that helps.
Great stuff! I am working with clients improving their profiles, and this is a handy list to share with them. Thanks!
Great to hear, thanks for sharing it!
This is outstandingly helpful, thank you for this!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastic article thanks Benji – the detail you’ve provided is brilliant.
A question, when you click on a skill (blue box) to open a search by skills – do you have any idea as to how LinkedIn is ranking these? I have tried various different skill searches and quite often get results where the person listed doesn’t have the skill searched for.
Would love to optimize my skills so I’m appearing in search results … but totally lost as to how.
Thank you, very insightful and helpful!