TIPS FOR USING LINKEDIN FOR SEO
For a long time I have been telling clients and friends to use LinkedIn to get an easy free link to their website. But now it looks link LinkedIn added no-follow tags to their links; I still think it is a good idea to put the links on your public profile even if they don’t do much for SEO anymore. See the video for the full story.
Transcription
Hi! This is Eric with Globe Runner SEO. I was about to do this great video about how to put links on your LinkedIn profile, and I still think it’s very important, but this is really breaking news, to me at least, LinkedIn has now put no follow tags on their profile links, which is a brand new thing. So, let me show you what I’m talking about. This is a good chance for me to talk about no-follow tags in general.
So, a no follow tag, you’ll find it in the code of a website, and it’s after a link, so you can see on my profile here, I’ve got these links that are outbound links to different websites that I own. BabySafeTravel.com is another company that I own and I wanted to put a link on there so that everyone that is connected to me on LinkedIn and viewed my public profile could go to my website. Just this last month, these were valid links that actually passed link juice, that actually promoted the page for BabySafeTravel.com, and gave it some link juice. I just found out that LinkedIn, probably with their connection with Twitter, have added no follow tags. I have a tool here that shows no follows, it highlights them in pink. You can see that now we have no follow tags added to those links on the page. I’ll just go ahead and click over to Twitter, to show you guys Twitter and you can see that Twitter does the same thing. Here are the links inside Twitter, and they have no follow tags on all of the links on their page.
So, I will go ahead and show you how to put these links in your profile because I think it’s important to have them, but now that they have no follow tags, they are not going to pass link juice or boost your SEO, but you will get traffic if you have a lot of connections. People will look at your profile and follow it to your website. The links go right here under “website,” you can edit them and add them here, and you can add up to three. The way to make them public is by going under “accounts and settings,” and scroll down to “public profile,” and right here you get to pick what you want to be public and what you do not. So, I want everything public on mine but you may not want any past positions or things such as that public. Here is the important part, “website”, you want to make sure that is checked and that those links to your website are in the public version so that everyone can see websites that you are associated with. If you are a company owner, I highly recommend that you get all of those employees to put your company on there. You don’t just want them to say “my company,” it’s much better to get them to actually use the name of the company. To do that, I will just show you one more thing. If you look at these links right here, you can say “edit,” and I will go ahead and edit BabySafeTravel.com, and I want to make sure that it says BabySafeTravel.com or GlobeRunnerSEO.com, NOT “my company.” Simply using “my company” doesn’t give the user any information. Select “other,” then type in the company name. This way, people know what website they are going to and what they are going to be looking at. It’s a valuable thing to do whether it passes link juice or not.
I will show you on BabySafeTravel.com for instance, we use no follow tags on some of our links. No follow tags were created to stop spammers from spamming comment boxes and things of that nature. It’s something to think about when you want to use them and when you don’t want to use them. When you are gathering links on the web, you can look inside the code and find the no follow tags. Let’s see if we can’t find these tags on LinkedIn. I’m going to view my public profile, then I’m going to view source.
This may take me a bit to find but let’s see what we can do. What you need to do is scroll down until you find your websites. Here are the links to my websites and it says “ref = no follow,” and that makes it a no follow link. Although it is a valid link, Google will not actually count that as a valid link and pass link juice through it for SEO purposes. No follow tags are a great thing to know about for this reason. Thanks so much for your time, we will come back and do some more great tips for SEO soon!
Please follow us and leave us your comments, we would love to hear from you! Thanks again, this was Eric from Globe Runner Search Engine Optimization.
