Adding Your Twitter Account

Open your LinkedIn profile, Click on Add Twitter Account and enter your Twitter username. I prefer to Display my Twitter Account on my LinkedIn profile by checking the box. This allows me to Tweet from Twitter and have my Tweets show up in my LinkedIn profile and as my Share status.

Now my Twitter account is tied to my LinkedIn profile so my Tweets appear in my Status box.

People can easily see your full Status activity by clicking on See all activity where they will see a full listing of your LinkedIn activity.

If you choose Company Website or one of the other options in the dropdown list, your listing will look like this. I chose Company Website so it displays Company Website instead of my Company name or target keyword phrase.

The trick is to choose Other, enter your Company name or keyword phrase in the middle box.

Now your listing will look like this and your Company name or keyword phrases are clickable links to your blog or website.

But I’m not here to talk about Black Friday. I have something more exciting to share…

As you know I started posting some tips on building a powerful presence on LinkedIn and I hope you’re learning a lot (and taking action).

I only posted two tips so far and I decided to do a search on Google to see if my posts showed up. Here are the results of my search.

I rank number 3, 4 AND 6 for Supercharge Your LinkedIn profile!!

I rank number 4 AND 5 for Searchable LinkedIn Profiles. That’s 5 first page rankings in minutes!

How did I do it? First of all I use WordPress for my blog and I have some cool plugins that help my SEO. I’ve been using WordPress and SEO plugins for years and I’ve had some great SEO results. Now it seems like everything I post goes to the first page of Google in minutes.

Whats’ changed?

I recently switched my theme to the Genesis Framework from StudioPress.com and it’s improved my search rankings instantly. The Genesis Framework is powerful but easy to use and I highly recommend it. Enter code THANKS at checkout and you’ll receive 25% off all purchases until November 28,2011.

Leave me a comment and let me know what your favorite WordPress theme and SEO plugins are. I’ll compile a list of your favorites and share it with everyone.

Below your Basic Information is your Status Update section.  Your Share updates will appear right under your Basic Information and will also appear under All Updates on the Home page of LinkedIn.  You can configure your LinkedIn account so your Tweets will automatically appear as your Status.

Your Share your status using this box which is located on the Home page of LinkedIn. By checking the box, your Share will also be Tweeted.

Now we’ll move into your Experience or Employment section. To add your Current and Previous positions, click +Add Postion.

Simply fill out the form and click Save Changes. Make sure your add a brief but clear description of each position. Use your target keywords in your description so you will be found when people search for your skillsets. You can also Ask for Recommendations from previous co-workers in this form.

Once you’ve added your Current and Previous positions, you’ll move to your Education. Simply click Add a School to enter your schools, years attended and your major. You can also Request Recommendations from classmates and educators.

Your Recommendations are displayed next and you can Ask for a Recommendation in this section by clicking on the link. Fill out the form and a Recommendation request will be sent to the contacts you choose.

Your profile is almost complete. In my next blog post we’ll put the finishing touches on your LinkedIn profile. Remember to take your time and fill out all of the information completely. Use your target keywords or skills in your description so you’re profile will easily be found when someone searches on LinkedIn or on Google. If you have any questions or comments, please add a comment to this post and I’ll get back to you.

Your LinkedIn profile provides people with a comprehensive summary of you, your education, work experience and your achievements. Your LinkedIn profile also links people to other social media properties and websites where you can showcase your expertise.

Your LinkedIn profile consists of:

1. Your headline
2. Your photo
3. Status updates
4. Vanity URL
5. Summary
6. Applications
7. Experience
8. Education
9. Recommendations
10. Additional information
11. Personal information
12. Contact information

Headline

Your profile headline is the single most important part of your profile. Your profile headline will appear next to your name in the search results. As your name appears in the search results, your headline must be compelling enough to make people want to click on your profile to learn more about you. You should never just put your name and company name in your headline.

You will also select your Location and Industry in this section of your profile setup. You can also create multilingual profiles in the Basic Information section of your profile.

Here’s my finished Profile Headline.

Here’s the profile headline for Viveka von Rosen. You know exactly what she does for a living.

And here’s why it’s important to use your target keyword phrases in your profile headline. Viveka is the top search result in Google for “LinkedIn expert” out of 159 million search results.

Take time now to create your compelling profile headline using your target keyword phrases.

In my next blog post, we’ll continue developing your LinkedIn profile. Feel free to add your profile headlines in the Comments of this post and I’ll let you know how you’re doing.

Guess what? I’m writing a book about LinkedIn for a major publisher (details to follow soon!). I’m going to post my drafts on this blog and I would love your feedback as the book develops. I’ll be posting at least 5 times a week until I cover all of the topics in the book. I’ll use your feedback as I develop the final version of the book so please follow along and leave your feedback, good or bad.

Why am I writing a book about LinkedIn when there’s already a ton available? Well most of the books on Amazon are a couple of years old. There are some really good books but they only teach the basics of LinkedIn like creating your account, updating your profile and connecting with others.

LinkedIn has changed a lot in the past two years. They went public recently so they have a lot of cash to invest in site improvements. Boy have they improved the site, adding a lot of new features and tools.

When LinkedIn started, people thought it was just for connecting with past coworkers and finding a job. I signed up when LinkedIn first came out in 2004 and didn’t really use it for a couple of years. I filled out my profile and connected with a few friends but I wasn’t looking for a job so I didn’t come back often. Today I use LinkedIn almost every day in my job as an Online Marketing/SEO Analyst for a major software company. We run B2B ads that generate great leads for our sales reps. I also participate in Groups and use the Answers section to do market research.

I’ll get into more detail in my book about how I’m using LinkedIn today. Whether you’re looking for job, looking for clients or want reconnect with past co-workers, read my blog and give me some feedback on the content that will become my book.

In my next post I’ll show you how to create a compelling LinkedIn profile that will get you noticed in LinkedIn and in Google searches.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Today we lost the Thomas Edison of our generation. Steve Jobs passed away at the young age of 56. There’s so much I could say but right now I’m speechless. As I look around my office I see signs of Steve. My iPod, my iPad, iTunes on my computer, and my iPhone will always remind me of Steve. I just watched his Stanford commencement address again. I watched it years ago and it had little impact on my. Tonight, it means so much more to me.

Here’s the text from Steve’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech. RIP Steve!

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

A subdomain is a prefix added to your URL that differentiates your blog from your website. For example, a subdomain for your blog would be http://blog.domain.com which makes your blog look like a different site from your website which is http://domain.com.

A subfolder is added to the end of your URL which separates your blog from your website. Your website is located at http://domain.com while your blog is located at http://domain.com/blog.

In the past, Google treated subdomains as a separate website so the content in your subdomains didn’t contribute to the search ranking of your primary domain. The content in http://blog.domain.com counted as one website and the content in http://domain.com counted as a separate website. Google ranked both sites separately.

At the same time, content located in http://domain.com and http://domain.com/blog counted as one website so it was beneficial to your search rankings to use subfolders instead of subdomains.

Recently Google decided to consider subdomains the same way as subdomains with respect to your search ranking. Now it doesn’t matter if you use subdomains or subfolders for your blog. Both methods will benefit your search ranking.

If you want to read more about the recent Google update visit http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/08/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

Image via Wikipedia

Google released another algorithm update last week that was designed to weed out low quality content sites. Many low quality websites disappeared from the search rankings which was great. Who wants to see garbage websites in the search rankings?

The update was designed to weed out content farms and link farms. Content farms are automated websites that use RSS to pull content from reputable websites and share that content among other automated websites. They websites are linked together in a spiderweb arrangement so not all sites are linked to each other. The spiderweb configuration is designed to fool Google into thinking these sites are unrelated and they just happen to be sharing some content. In reality, all of the sites are controlled by one entity and eventually Google catches up with them.

Link farms work the same way. Sites are linked together in a spiderweb configuration so they seem unrelated. Thousands of related websites can be linked together which Google loves to see. If you link to one of the sites in the link farm, your website will benefit from the power of the thousands of related links until you get caught.

The problem with Google’s recent update is that many reputable websites were flagged as content or link farms even though most of their content is original and unique. Sites like www.ehow.com and www.ezinearticles.com are user-generated content websites. That means all of the content is created and uploaded to the site by the web visitors. These sites aren’t trying to trick Google to receive higher search rankings. They’re just providing a venue for people to share their content.

For years www.ezinearticles.com was a great website for small business owners and consultants to post their content. By writing quality content and posting it online let consultants demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. It was like free advertising.

Articles posted on EzineArticles.com started showing up on the first page of Google. The combination of a website with hundreds of thousands of pages of content, lots of keyword-related content and lots of internal links made EzineArticles.com a powerful website.

As usual, once people saw they could get top search rankings by posting articles, they started posting thousands of articles. Article spinning software was created so you can take one article and change the wording to create ten similar, but different articles. Offshore workers started writing articles in broken English for pennies. Article directories were being flooded with low quality content that was full of keywords and links.

So when Google figures out how people are tricking their algorithm, they update the algorithm to weed out the low quality websites. It’s necessary for Google to stay on top of their search results to ensure the highest quality results. The bad news is that many innocent, high quality websites are being punished because they had links to the sites that were targeted.

The cream will rise back to the top as Google adjusts their algorithm and the reputable websites adjust. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t try to trick the system to get good search rankings. Provide high quality content on a regular basis and you’ll do just fine.

If you want to read more about the winners and losers of the latest Google update visit these articles. Also tell us how you fared by Commenting on this post.

Let Google Know How You Were Affected

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110303-092918

Penalizing Good Sites to Get Some Bad Sites?

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110302-092711

Google Kills eHow Competitors

http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors