Make Your LinkedIn Profile Great, Make It Smart
As said before, your LinkedIn profile is how you make a first impression on others. Whether you know it or not, you are being regularly researched online. For the job seeker then, it’s exceedingly important you make that recruiter pick up the phone and call you.
Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile
Just as it’s important to be descriptive for the person reading your profile to understand who and what you’re about, it’s equally important that search engines understand you, too. Why does Google, Bing, and Yahoo matter? When people research you, they typically don’t go to specific sites to find you. They enter your name and probably your location into a search engine, then start sifting through the results.
Associating your name with relevant keywords is why optimizing your profile for people and machines matters.
For example, let’s say you are an independent accountant. You focus on providing accounting and tax preparation services to small businesses in your city. You have no staff, no marketing budget, and a rudimentary network. How do you promote yourself?
One way to help you get found is to write your profile to include keywords that people searching for you will use.
Make a list of the types of businesses you want to attract. Let’s say you want to focus for now on lawn keepers because it’s summer:
- Lawn maintenance services
- Lawn mowers
- Gardening services
- 98122
- Small business accounting
- Small business tax preparation
This simple example lists search terms that you can incorporate into your profile. The search engines look at relevancy and proximity of terms to one another to determine context. That is, if your profile says the following, then a search engine is likely to score you a high match to the searcher’s query:
David Thompson is a small business accountant with 10+ years experience providing small business accounting and small business tax preparation for lawn maintenance, gardening services, and lawn mower small businesses in the Seattle area.
Make LinkedIn Profiles Work For You
As you write entries about your work experience and history, use specific terms. Avoid generic statements like, “Successfully achieved first quarter results for my division.” Instead, you can say, “Generated 24% rate of return on physical inventories in the first quarter of 2008 using CPERP inventory management system.”
Put Some Flair Into Your LinkedIn Profile
The impulse with LinkedIn profiles is to write dry, conventional resume-like statements. I encourage you to show more color in your profile. Certainly profanity is out of the question for most people but I have seen profiles that use mild instances to good effect. You know what is acceptable in your industry, so use good judgment.
By injecting some color into your profile, you reveal yourself as a well-rounded person – not another resume. And everyone wants to connect with a real person, not a piece of paper.
Honor the Facts
Tempting as it may be to stretch the truth here and there, you can better compensate for any shortcomings by using gentle humor or short-and-sweet sentences to fill in the gaps.
New to the work world and fresh from an internship this summer? Show what you learned but also show how you grew and enjoyed it.
“Advertising Account Specialist freshly minted from Northern University wants to surprise and delight your clients like I learned from Watson Advertising the summer of 2008. I listen to what they want, craft a brief so the creatives get it right, and know to fetch coffee if you need it.”
When In Doubt, Imitate
Look at several profiles in your profession on LinkedIn. When you find one that impresses you, study what makes it work. Pick apart the formula, then swap out the keywords that person used with the ones you need. You are better off imitating than being boring.
Looking for Some Mutual Optimization?
Want to review a statement before going public? We can’t give you lawyerly advice but we are great with a thumbs up or thumbs down and reasons why. Post your optimized profile in the Comments.