Many small businesses, especially local businesses, ask us if they can benefit from participating in social media networks.

We always answer with a hearty “YES” and advise most to start with LinkedIn.

There are LOTS of reasons for your small business to be on LinkedIn. The big reason I want to share with you now is how LinkedIn helps increase your natural (organic) search engine rankings.

Why LinkedIn

As a network of about 45 million business professionals, LinkedIn is viewed as an established authority site by Google and other search engines. This makes LinkedIn a powerful resource for you in your search engine marketing efforts.

What To Do

• Set your business profile to be public – this enables search engines to see your profile, index the information and return it within search results…this is a must starting point for higher search rankings.

• Customize your links – instead of using the default setting of “my website,” “my blog,” etc., customize them with carefully selected descriptive phrases used by people searching for what you sell…instead of “My Website” label it “Birmingham Security Services,” as an example.

• Use Your LinkedIn URL – your public LinkedIn URL must be optimized for search engines. LinkedIn allows you to specify what you want in your URL…it does not have to be your name or company name. Yep, that means I could make my URL www.LinkedIn.com/in/birminghamsecurityservices instead of www.LinkedIn.com/in/BrianOffenberger. See how I’ve got my key search phrase in the URL? That’s golden in helping you achieve higher search engine rankings for the search term in the URL. Make it a good one. You set this up at the “Your Public Profile URL” section within your LinkedIn profile.

• Employees – make sure your key employees have profiles within your company LinkedIn profile. These can be indexed by search engines as well to return further search results for your company.

There’s little doubt LinkedIn can help your company, even local companies, achieve higher natural search engine rankings. Apply these tips and let me know how they help you.