Use LinkedIn for Link Building

Written on September 4, 2008 – 11:24 am | by Shell Harris |

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Many of you may know about LinkedIn. If you don’t, then let me enlighten. Linkedin is a social networking site that targets business professionals. It is helpful in setting up relationships for business opportunities and partnerships. It also has a more social aspect that is gaining in popularity. You can read more about LinkedIn here: What is LinkedIn?

And while the business networking aspect is great, I’m writing to tell you it can be useful for your SEO efforts too, specifically link building. You may not know this, but LinkedIn does not employ the nofollow attribute on its links, like most other social networking sites. So that means we can use LinkedIn responsibly to build some nice one-way links to our sites and blogs. Even better your employees can use this to build some SEO-friendly links to your company site.

Lets look at the easy steps to do this.

1. Of course the first step is to get a LinkedIn account, if you don’t have one already join today.

2. Go to your profile page and click the link at the top right, “Edit Public Profile Settings”.

3. You can edit “Your Public Profile URL” and choose either your name or your company name. I used my name. Company owners may be better off using the company name for branding purposes. Some of you more SEO-minded people can use keywords in your URL, but I don’t believe spamming your url with keywords is the best option. When you have decided, set the address.

4.Choose “Full View recommended” as your option so search engines can see your links.


5. Be sure to check the “Websites” check box so they are showing on your public profile. You don’t want to hide from the search engine spiders. If you don’t have any sites, go add them (see step 6)

6. Add your websites, if you haven’t already. Be sure to use descriptive keywords in your link text. LinkedIn will give you the default text of “My Website” and “My Blog”, but I’m betting you can do better. I used SEO Company and SEO Blog. And try use all three website options, deep link to one site if you don’t have three sites. Be sure to choose “Other” when editing the website or you can’t enter your custom text.


7. To make these links have more authority, you will need to link to your public profile page. Put it on your own site, on your blog, in your comments on other blogs and so forth. Oh, and of course make connections with LinkedIn.Tthat is why you joined, right?

You have just created up to three one-way links on a high-ranking, high-authority site…for free.

Feel free to request a connection with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/shellharris. My email is shell [@] bigoakinc.com.

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  1. 20 Responses to “Use LinkedIn for Link Building”

  2. By neil on Sep 4, 2008 | Reply

    im a member of linkedin but have never spent any time with it. glad i found this resource thanks

  3. By David Carralon on Sep 4, 2008 | Reply

    Hi Shell, you are making very good points in this post, my linkedin profile is indeed passing valuable link juice to my other websites, namely my seo freelance services website.

  4. By Ringorne on Sep 4, 2008 | Reply

    “Oh, and of course make connections with LinkedIn. That is why you joined, right?”

    No, I joined to market to people. Is that wrong?

  5. By Denver SEO on Sep 4, 2008 | Reply

    Never thought about LinkedIN for backlinks. I’ll give this a go.

  6. By Lee on Sep 5, 2008 | Reply

    Define “responsibly”!!!

    In all seriousness, nice post - I’m off to Linked In right now to join up.

  7. By Jonathan Bentz on Sep 5, 2008 | Reply

    I have employed this technique with my co-workers and the employees of some of our clients with great success. The key is to make sure you have your profiles published publicly, however. Worthless without the public publish. Have a great weekend!

  8. By Riverside on Sep 5, 2008 | Reply

    This is a very useful article, I was thinking of joining Linkedin before, but was kinda skittish…I think that it’s definately a positive step now. Thanks!

  9. By Arnold on Sep 6, 2008 | Reply

    Linkedin isnt just networking, its totally taking off as a employment site too. They were one of 3 just added to the About.com top 10 Employment site list:

    http://www.linkedin.com
    http://www.indeed.com
    http://www.realmatch.com

    complete top ten employment site list here:
    http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm

  10. By Roger on Sep 6, 2008 | Reply

    Hey man, i learn something new today. Thank you so much. You really spend a lot of time post quality content for your blog and you deserve the credits. Have a nice weekend.

  11. By Udi Drezner on Sep 7, 2008 | Reply

    If you are interested in link building, you can sign up to LookupPage, which is a new service in which you can easily create a public online profile and insert “do follow” links to all of your other profiles/websites.

    This service in not a social network like LinkedIn, but designated for professional users which want to create a web page of their own, that will be visible in all search engines.

    LookupPage is free, but there is also a possibility to upgrade and get your own domain with sponsored listing to make sure you are found whenever you name is being searched on Google.

    For example, you can Google my name or search my name in Yahoo to see that my LookupPage is the first result :-)

  12. By Shell Harris on Sep 8, 2008 | Reply

    Thanks, Udi.

    I signed up for a LookUp page myself: http://www.lookuppage.com/users/shellharris/

  13. By Udi Drezner on Sep 8, 2008 | Reply

    Did you like the service?

    I get about 30 visitors per week to my LookupPage and see exactly when my page was visited, from where, and which search terms were used to find me online.

    Maybe you should introduce the service to your readers?

  14. By Shell Harris on Sep 8, 2008 | Reply

    Udi, You already announced it. ;-) We may write about it as well. Or you can write a guest post if you like. You brought it to our attention and we don’t mind you writing about it. Send you post in a word doc and we’ll post it.

    I just signed up today and it was easy, other than that I haven’t had much time to devote to it.

  15. By Ranveer Mittal on Sep 22, 2008 | Reply

    Please check my linkedin profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/niwell

    Thanks
    Ranveer Mittal
    http://www.niwell.ws
    http://www.niwell.com

  16. By Jerry Okorie on Oct 9, 2008 | Reply

    I have now implemented it. Thanks for letting us know.

  17. By Myron Tay on Oct 20, 2008 | Reply

    Thanks for verifying me in LinkedIn. :)

  18. By Alyssa on Oct 31, 2008 | Reply

    Done and done. Thanks for helping me improve my profile!

  19. By Anonymous on Nov 9, 2008 | Reply

    I’m also a linkedin member and I joined linkedin to connect with professionals and also to get profile visibility.

  20. By cynthia on Nov 29, 2008 | Reply

    Thanks so much for these ideas.You will find in the InLinks list also web pages that contain only hotlinks to your images.If you receive good traffic from Image Searches, you can build easy and fast backlinks to any website using either the first method (The Cloaked Landing Page) or the second one (The Magic Image URL) or you can use the two methods in a combo.

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  2. Sep 6, 2008: LinkedIn for SEO : Design Simple

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11/1/08 - We have removed the Website field from our comments. To many useless comments are being left with the purpose of link building. We are testing this to see if comments will still be made.

Big Oak SEO Blog

This SEO blog is provided by Big Oak SEO, a SEO Company. Most blog posts are related to search engine optimization, short reviews, SEO tips and increasing site conversions. Email us at contact@bigoakinc.com or give us a call 804-741-6776 to see how we can help your company. More

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