5 Ways to Boost SEO with LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to grow as a professional networking tool. There are easy ways to let it help your accounting firm’s SEO as well.

LinkedIn is increasing its clout rapidly as a big player in the professional and social networking realm. Almost everyone has a LinkedIn page these days, but do you know how to tweak it for the biggest SEO impact? I ran into a great slideshow sharing strategies to help the cause without costing a lot of money, time or stress. They can make a big difference in the way search engines, Google in particular, rank your firm and its relevance in the accounting world. Log in and see how easy it is with five simple tips:

• Links. The number and quality of links you have factor into Google’s page-ranking algorithm and LinkedIn lets you add three of them. Two of these count as high quality ones for search engines, so make sure you’ve used them to their full potential. One should link to your firm’s website, and the other to the company’s official blog. The third optional link can go anywhere you like, but Google doesn’t rank it as an important one. Even so, you can certainly set it to send viewers to another place that shares valuable information about the firm and its activities.
• Placement. Put your keywords and most important terms at the top of the page, because web crawlers start there and value the information up top more highly than what follows. Try using the Summary and Specialties sections or even your Professional Headline to convey your most significant keywords, especially for unusual or niche ones.
• Twitter. LinkedIn conveniently offers you a built-in spot for a Twitter link, and you can set tweets to update your LinkedIn status automatically. This is a great way to link two of the most powerful business networking platforms and increase your SEO power without any extra effort.
• Connections. Having a lot of connections appears to be one of the elements of profile page-ranking for Google, and whether or not that’s true you can certainly benefit from having plenty of connections here. You can become a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION) by joining one of several LION groups. Then users all across the network are free to connect. It’s quite effective for adding connections rapidly if you’re comfortable with the policy. Some consider it antithetical to the premise of LinkedIn and others have run into spam problems, but many love the new connections and have found no negatives. Different groups have different policies, so you may want to look into it and give it a cautious try.
• Groups. Joining groups that interest you personally and professionally boosts the size of your network and makes your profile more visible on the network, as well as allowing you to message and see the profiles of all group members. Besides that, ongoing discussions in these groups offer you plenty of opportunity to share views, learn something new and weigh in as an expert. That’s an SEO win.

LinkedIn is useful in a multitude of ways, from optimizing search placement to finding a job, and very simple to use. It’s constantly being improved as it grows, offering ever more ways to link yourself to people and information. Spend a few moments to learn how much this platform can do for you, and please let us know how else we can best utilize it.