Why you should optimize your LinkedIn profile links

There is enough info available about how and why to use LinkedIn and how you can add links to your profile. But why would you neglect optimizing your profile links, by leaving out the anchor text?

Recently, I came across two profiles with links that didn’t have one of the standard LinkedIn anchor texts, but also dind’t have a “polluted” anchor text. This means no company names, high competitive keywords or common anchor texts. In both cases it were links with a (pretty) unique anchortext.

Here’s Michael Gray’s profile. There are three links listed in his profile. Two of Graywolf‘s links aren’t anchor text optimized (the ‘My Company’ and ‘My Blog’ links) and one has a customized anchor text (Central Hub Website). Now check out Google’s search results.

Example number two is Peter vd Graaf’s profile. Peter has also optimized one of his three links; the link to his SEO workshop page has an optimized anchor text (not anymore; see comments). If you check the Google search results, you’ll notice that this page also ranking quite high (please note that the page’s language is Dutch, so I had to adjust the query language a bit).

In both cases, the anchor text used has no occurances on the page. I guess this is LinkedIn Google Bombing :)

Want to use these powerful links more efficiently? Edit the links in your profile.

In stead of filing your links under “My Blog” or “My Company”, you can file them under “Other”. Other means anchor text.

Fill in the anchor text of your choice and save the settings. Link back to your LinkedIn profile to get the links indexed (if it isn’t indexed yet) and you just received three powerful links.