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Many people think that networking is a dirty technique, but as a social networking site LinkedIn is totally different from other sites. It is a professional, business and career oriented social networking site which allows you to connect and meet professional experts in different industries across the globe. LinkedIn is all about connecting, but before we connect, we look for what we have in common.

Currently, there are millions of professionals on LinkedIn and these numbers are growing as we speak. The LinkedIn community enables you to connect with like minded people who in returns allow you to grow your business contacts and network.

As a registered member, you get to create your own personal profile with information about you, your company, your products and services. You can also mention your professional accomplishments. Once you’ve done this, you can begin to maintain a list of contacts which are known as connections and actively invite others to join your network and that whether they are existing LinkedIn users or not.

Increasing and Managing Your Contacts

In the business, your contacts are everything. You don’t need to know everyone, but make sure you know the people that know everyone!

That being said, the LinkedIn community is a great place to begin connecting with real professionals in order to begin growing your list of business contacts which could be done pretty easily. Just like any social networking site, you should approach like minded people to initiate the first contact (make sure that you’re not spamming people with your ads) and regularly keep in touch with them so in the long run, they’ll know, like and trust you.

Also, you can import almost any digital address book and web email contacts (Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc…) from the LinkedIn user account to increase your contact list.

LinkedIn Answers Tool

LinkedIn Answers is a great and most important tool which lets anyone to ask questions on any topic and allows anyone to answer those questions. Using this answers tool you are able to interact with many different people you don’t know. It’s a great way to grow your connections.

Asking questions is also a good way to interact with other experts. Your questions will be read and answered by so many people and you can make use of their expertise to do joint ventures or share business ideas.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups allow you to join any group that you want. You’ll then be able to meet great people and keep in touch with prospective business partners and clients.

Make sure that you’re a contributing member of each group you join. Post great content regularly, keep in touch with the other group members, etc…This will literally help you brand your name, your products, services and even business opportunities because people will begin to relate to you.

LinkedIn Jobs

LinkedIn is also a great place to post jobs or recruit employees to your company. Thousands of companies are hiring and recruiting on LinkedIn so if you’re a business owner looking for prospective employees, there you go!

If you’re looking for employment, there are so many great companies on LinkedIn offering great career opportunities.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is one of the toughest things and takes a lot of efforts and learning to become an expert. As because, LinkedIn is well ranked in all top search engines, your LinkedIn page will easily show up in the top 10 in search engine results for certain keywords. That means, you will get the free organic traffic to your page without any SEO efforts.

LinkedIn is a great social networking site. If it is used properly, it could really your business visibility and brand name. It also adds more credibility to your image and brand. LinkedIn Answers” easily allow you to become a known expert in your field of expertise. Keep in mind that LinkedIn should not be used a mass marketing outlet like Facebook or MySpace or even Twitter (you should only target what you’re looking forward to accomplish). Use this powerful social networking site and maximize your profits.

Posted under Search Engine Optimization

We can’t deny the fact that a continuous updated website with fresh and new content being updated frequently has a pretty good chance of performing well into Google search engine. Blogging is one of the best standing methods to expand websites content on a regular basis. As there are many platforms or blogging software available to choose from for running a blog, only few of them are good as compare to the flexibility offered by WordPress without any cost.

Google is always in a search of fresh and new content, and setting up a blog on your site, updating often with quality content, can definitely help out to achieve search rankings. The true beauty of WordPress is that there is a wide range of free plug-ins which you can easily install that will make your blog completely search engine friendly.

Following are some basic tips and necessary plug-ins should be considered when install a Word Press blog:

Template Design

The first configuration you need to do is work on customizing the design template to match your existing site. I suggest finding a template that matches as closely as possible to the look you are going for then work on tweaking its graphics, colors, and other particulars till you achieve the desired appearance.

Most of your changes will occur in the header.php, footer.php, index.php, and page.php files in the theme editor, however, the theme you install will dictate which files actually need to be updated. You will also need to make some adjustments to your CSS file. These changes all involve working with code and graphics, and are most likely left to a professional.

Once you have your design set up, the rest of the customization is considerably less technical. The following are suggestions that most people can do themselves and you probably will not need an expert to help you here.

Settings

Permalinks – The next thing you need to do is customize your URL’s. You do not want the default post URLs (“pageid=#”) as they are simply not search friendly and you want your default names to have some meaning to them. While you can customize your URL’s with various plug-ins, you may not always think to do this, so be sure to have a default you can live with.

Under the settings tab in your dashboard, click on permalinks. Here I suggest choosing one of the settings that includes the post name. Including the month and year is totally optional as it will have little to no impact on your search rankings, but you definitely do want to include the post name.

WWW or no WWW – With WordPress, there is no need to worry about the www vs no www redirects. It is handled for you, but you do need to select which variation you want, and it’s very simple to do. Under “General Settings” you will see two fields; one for “WordPress address” and the other, “Blog address”. Ensure that both these fields include the “www” (or not), whichever you prefer, and that’s it. (I always recommend using the “www” version of your URL as most people linking into your site will use it, and this will help keep a consistency among your site.

Required Plug-ins – There is an almost endless supply of free plug-ins out there that you can add to your site ranging from photo galleries and spam protection, to social media integrators for Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and others. While many of these others will benefit your blog and search rankings, the XML Sitemap, and SEO plug-ins are truly essential.

SEO Plug-in – When setting up your new installation, the first plug-in you need to install is one that will allow for totally customized title, Meta description tags, and page URL’s. There are a number of tools that do this ranging from the widely popular “All in One SEO Pack” to a relative newcomer “HeadSpace2″.

While I personally have yet to try HeadSpace2, it is high on my list, as it has been recommended by many industry professionals as the best WordPress SEO plug-in. For any new blog installation I highly recommend this plug-in be installed right away.

XML Sitemap Plug-in – To the best of my knowledge, HeadSpace2 does not have an XML sitemap option, and as such I highly recommend “Google XML Sitemaps“. This plug-in will automatically generate XML sitemaps for you on the fly and submit it to Google every time you add, remove, or update a page or post. This helps ensure that Google has the latest information at all times. It’s a very simple plug-in to install and configure and once setup, you can forget about it and it will do the job for you.

If a good optimized website updated regularly with interesting content and is correctly setup then it will surely do well in Google search engine. As well as the WordPress has the power to make this process very easy so you only need to worry about writing great articles and selling your customers. The functions of the plug-ins are much advanced and will make the optimization lot easier and increasing your chances for top ranking.

Posted under Blogging, Internet Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization, SEO Tips