How can LinkedIn help promote my website?

Posted by John

January 10, 2008

Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
January 9, 2008

Are you a networking maniac? Do you jump at the chance to network with others? I'm not that kind of person for security reasons, however, when comes to LinkedIn, I'm all over it.

If you check out my LinkedIn profile, I have 1700+ connections. Going out to the third degree, the numbers are in the millions. How can LinkedIn help promote my website?

Before I get to the answer, let me just say that there are more reasons to have a professional profile on LinkedIn than site promotion. Site promotion is, however, an additional benefit.

YES!!! LinkedIn can help you promote your site. First, the professional profile will lend legitimacy to you and your company. Second, existing and potential customers will be able to link to you, therefore, allowing you to keep in touch with them and sell to them in the future. Finally, in building your profile, you have the ability to place links in your profile. Google indexes the public version of your profile (http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnasimpson), so the link pointing to your site will be picked up by Google. Linkjuice will be passed to your web site because your profile will contain information related to your actual site.

There is, however, a special method for placing the link in your profile that will give you the most bank for your buck. The best way for your link to show up on someone else's web site is with the keywords being the displayed text. The second best way is to have the url name be the displayed text. It's this method that you are shooting for on LinkedIn.

Click on the “My Profile” tab to modify your profile.
Click the text next to the Websites heading in order to add websites to your profile.
Instead of choosing My Website, My Company, My Blog, etc., choose Other:. By choosing Other:, you now have the ability to enter the text that is going to be clicked on in order to get to the website. Enter the website URL in the top box and the site URL, starting with http: in the box below it.

Entry Page:

example of adding a website to your profile on linkedin