Use social networking tools to enhance search performance at no cost.

You have most likely heard of MySpace and Facebook. (if you have not, then we cant be friends anymore)  

LinkedIn.com offers professionals a place to manage an interactive resume and professional contact network.  Click here for an example profile page: Tom Ritter

To better understand the actual benefits of this free platform consider the keyword phrase “Tom Ritter”.  This particular keyword phrase has some stiff competition in the first page results of Google. (Click here to see Google results for ”Tom Ritter”)  I am competing with a nationally reknowned dentist, and a famous actor for visibility in the results. 

I do not have a website or blog to compete with these other results. I am on the first page of Google simply because I created a LinkedIn profile.  At the time of this post my LinkedIn profile ranked #6 on the first page of Google results. 

I will concede that there are only about 575,000 websites related to the search “Tom Ritter”.  If my name was “Brad Pitt” the competition would consist of about 25 million competitive results.  But still, I am beating out over half a million websites without having spent a dime to do so. 

For those of you with some real Search Engine Optimization savvy, my LinkedIn page boasts a Google PR of 3.  This means that any links I create on my LinkedIn page actually improve the search performance of the sites I link to. 

So set yourself up on LinkedIn, and get all your employees to do the same. Then, create website links to your company website from all of your respective profiles.  The Search Engine Optimization benefits will be measureable, and you cannot beat the price.

Make no mistake about it, my LinkedIn profile performs because I update it at least once a month and I have developed a decent network of 150 contacts and growing.  But even that is very little effort to maintain. 

And make no mistake about this……………….Mr. Furley was the man.