How to Choose The Right Keywords For Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is by far the biggest professional social network in the world. Even though we can see through signs from Facebook that they probably won’t let LinkedIn be alone on this market, as of now, LinkedIn is THE reference and The Place To Be.

What is (actually) LinkedIn? 

LinkedIn is a directory, a database (the most important one in the world) of professional profiles.

You access the information on LinkedIn through a search engine located at the top of all the pages of the interface. Whether you are looking for a person, a skill, college alumni, businesses, groups… everything is gotten with this search engine. LinkedIn is driven by search.

When you make a search, it is analyzed by LinkedIn and a certain number of profiles are proposed based on the criteria of relevance (relevance of keywords) that (as with Google) only LinkedIn knows.

What is a keyword for LinkedIn?

It’s a word which is repeated several times and appears in some important areas for LinkedIn, such as job titles (which sounds logical for a professional social network) or summary. Your summary must look more like a skills and “added-value” summary than a career summary.

[Tweet “LinkedIn is based on this principle of keywords. “]You can be visible on LinkedIn only through the keywords selected in the way they have been written. Try it : “Telecom engineer” is different from “Telecoms engineer “; you won’t have the same search results.

ViewQ from my account (LinkedIn search results are personalized) : 28,837 results for “telecom engineer” and 3,917 results for “telecoms engineer”.

This means that you can enhance the probability of appearing in the search results by optimizing the keywords on your profile. If you are able to get closer to the way someone looking for your skills will use LinkedIn for their searches, then you will have more chances to appear in their search results, thus to be visible.

How will they search you?

Then the right question to ask yourself when creating your profile isn’t how you should introduce yourself, but how the people you want to be seen by will search for your skills.

THE essential question that we all should ask ourselves is : what are the good keywords to put in our profile?

Find job descriptions

For this, you must start by finding job descriptions closed to you and especially to what you want to do. It is very likely that if someone uses a term in an offer or a job description, they will use the same specific terms when they make a search on LinkedIn. A good site to do that is indeed. Indeed is an “employment-related metasearch engine for job listings” (Wikipedia).

The idea is to find not one, but several offers matching your objective.

The problem is that one offer may be long and it’s not always easy to get the main keywords from it.

Find the right keywords

A tool allows to do so, it is free and you don’t even have to create an account: Wordle. Wordle is a tool allowing to make word clouds from a proposed text. The obtained clouds give more space to the words that appear more often.

When someone writes a job description or an offer, they are always very careful about the terms they use. These are important documents that are often written very precisely. So, to put more emphasis on some terms, these terms are repeated several times.

You just have to find a text matching your needs. Visit the wordle website, click on “Create your own”. Then you have to paste your text and click on “Go”. You get a word cloud putting more emphasis on the essential keywords.

This is a job offer on Indeed :

Company Overview:

CompanyX is a Gold Salesforce Implementation Partner focused on delivering robust business solutions leveraging cloud-computing platforms. Salesforce recognizes us as a Partner with proven expertise and in 2013, CompanyX was ranked as one of the top 10 Salesforce Partners driving business to the ecosystem. Our client base includes a variety of industries: financial services,healthcare, technology, and professional services. CompanyX’s offerings include end-to-end deployment of salesforce.com’s SalesCloud and ServiceCloud applications, Force.com development services, application integration, data migration services, and end user and administrator training. We build products on the Force.com platform that are sold on the AppExchange and used by boutique businesses and Fortune 500 companies. CompanyX prides itself on developing innovative solutions for complex, technical projects. You know Salesforce.  Now get to know CompanyX!  Here you’ll be part of a Professional Services team that offers a continuing 3-month onboarding process designed to acclimate you to our culture and our clients.  During this time you’ll be exposed to Salesforce Certification Prep and our Boot Camp Program.  At CompanyX employees work hard because they’re passionate about what they do.  They’re also passionate about having leisure time as a group in/out of the office, which is why we arrange monthly social events and offer several in-office perks.  Come be a part of our team! CompanyX is looking for a seasoned and strategic Product Manager to define and execute the roadmap for its growing portfolio of Salesforce.com AppExchange products.  This role will report to the VP of Products and will interact directly with Sales & Marketing Leadership, Offshore Development Teams and Salesforce ISV team to manage product releases and provide technical expertise, sales tools, product demonstrations and customer success stories.  In addition to maintaining and enhancing a top selling Calendaring application and a brand new Sharepoint replacing Intranet solution for Salesforce;  this role will be an integral part of new product definition and market research.The ideal candidate will have a track record of success participating in all aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle, from initial market research through development, launch and ongoing support.  Because CompanyX products are subscription based and cover a broad range of customers and industries, experience with Agile and iterative product development is a big plus in order to adapt the products to a variety of use cases. The Product team uses Agile processes and tools to organize, track and communicate product plans that are well aligned with customer requirements and sales & marketing priorities. We are looking for a talented Product Manager to join a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment filled with interesting challenges and many opportunities for contribution and personal growth.

Position Overview:

• Evaluate new product opportunities, define high level features in conjunction with Sales & Marketing in order to scope out market opportunities
• Define detailed product requirements & manage development versions and sprints working with Jira Agile tools and established development teams
• Participate in sales calls as a “Product Technical Specialist”
• Create and maintain high quality demonstration environments that showcase product capabilities and use cases for CompanyX industry specialties – Financial Services, Healthcare, etc.
• Communicate product roadmaps to customers, internal stakeholders and Salesforce Account Executives and Sales Engineers
• Produce and update use case focused customer success materials with Marketing including printed materials, product websites and videos
• Research product impact of new Salesforce Platform features

Basic Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as a Product Manager or equivalent
• Bachelor’s degree (Marketing, Computer Science, Engineering, Business, etc.) necessary 
• Experience working with cross-functional teams across product development lifecycles
• Experience working with remote teams
• Salesforce.com knowledge, experience and admin certification.  Certification is an ongoing requirement for the position.
• Self-starter: motivated and able to take the initiative
• Excellent strategic thinking, time management, and prioritization skills
• Ability to make decisions; experience in meeting tight deadlines and adapting to changing priorities

Desired Skills/Certifications:

• Familiarity with Agile development

What We Offer (CompanyX & You):

• Medical & Dental Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• 401(k) Plan w/ company match

What We Give (100% CompanyX):

• Short-term & Long-term Disability
• Life and Accidental Death & Dismemberment Insurance
• Paid Holidays
• Unlimited Vacation Days
• Flexible work options
• Education Reimbursement Program
• Learning & Development Programs
• Employee Referral Bonus Program
• Monthly Socials
• Weekly Refreshments (of your choice)
• In-office massages
• An amazing, hassle-free environment

And this is the same offer through Wordle :

Be careful, Wordle doesn’t work like LinkedIn. Wordle works essentially with a repetition of terms. LinkedIn takes into account their position in your profile: headline, summary, job titles, skills…

Wordle probably won’t reveal the essential keywords you already know. Wordle will allow you to identify more particularly the secondary keywords you might have missed.

Wordle proposes several combinations of font styles, colors and positioning. If the representation you get is sot readable enough, click on “randomize” to change it. You may have to click ten times or more to have a really good representation.

Then you just have to grab the main keywords and integrate them on your profile. If in the representation a word takes too much room and interferes with the readability, you may still right click on it to remove it.

The idea is to do the same with many texts matching your needs to have a vision as realistic and true as possible.

Using Wordle I realized for example that the keyword “purchase” was essential for a marketing manager, which wasn’t that obvious.

See what your profile says about you

Besides using Wordle to find the right keywords to put on your profile, you can also use it to see what your profile says about you or to display your word cloud on your profile (attached to your summary for example).

If you do it for you, you’ll see if the right keywords are visible enough. If you do it for your profile, it will help people visiting you having a better understanding on who you are and what are your skills.

Go on your LinkedIn profile then select all the text, from your name to the bottom. Copy it then paste it in Wordle. Once you get the result, click on “randomize” to have a readable overview. Print your screen, paste it on a drawing tool (Paint is enough). Cut the text out. Save it (JPG, GIF or PNG). Go back to LinkedIn. Click on “edit profile” then on the “click to add a video, image, document, presentation” icon.

As this image is generic and concerns your whole profile, add it to your summary.

This is Kim Garst’s LinkedIn profile through Wordle :

What you will have on LinkedIn is a synthetic image of your main keywords. This image will be seen and readable by the human eye, but its content won’t be indexed by LinkedIn.

If you are a Social Media consultant and offer to your clients to rework or optimize their LinkedIn profile, you may make a cloud of keywords before and after so that your clients can better visualize the work done.

Now that you’ve learned how to choose the right keywords for your LinkedIn profile, which ones will you start adding? Share below!

Source: http://kimgarst.com/how-to-choose-the-right-keywords-for-your-linkedin-profile