Managing your online reputation will be more important over time for everyone - as we grow up the content and material that search engines will collect about us is phenomenal. For many, the CV will cease to exist and be replaced by online reputation, search engine results and specialist business networks like LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has managed to hold on to the title of business social network over increasing competition from Facebook and other professional networks like Xing or even Plaxo. LinkedIn is the default business card ‘swap’ tool and now has more features then just a list of your work experience.

Best tool for curating your online profile?

If you work online and don’t have a profile on LinkedIn then you better ask yourself why? If you’re answer is ‘I dont need to be headhunted’ then you better give that idea the boot. You need to LinkedIn to help increase your personal SEO and its quite likely the best tool for curating your work and professional life.

Getting Started with curating your LinkedIn profile

Here is my LinkedIn profile - you’ll see I have a custom URL or maybe thats a vanity URL http://www.linkedin.com/in/damiensaunders

Once you have your custom URL you’ll be able to promote this via your web, email signature, etc and Google Search Results should now include this link. For this reason always keep your name in your custom URL.

So now starting thinking about your keywords, description and tags - LinkedIn has great tools for your profile - not all of which get indexed into Google.

One great area is the URL section at the bottom of your profile page. Here you can choose options like My Blog or My Work, but if you choose Custom - then you can type any description you want like Damien Saunders - Social Media Marketing.

Adding your Blog and Slideshare to LinkedIn

LinkedIn is slowing allowing apps to be added to your profile - so you can add your Blog to LinkedIn and show a most recent post. Another good option is to add a presentation from Slideshare.

So keep up the work and curate that LinkedIn profile to make it easier to find yourself online. If you haven’t already, maybe go edit your Google Profile too.

Tags: Social Media, social media reputation, LinkedIn

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Meet the author

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Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.