Are You LinkedIn?

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for web design (and SEO!)
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - search engines love links.  If you want your website to have a good ranking on the major search engines, then you want other websites out there to link back to your site.

But one thing we haven't talked about too much is the quality of the links.  The search engines take into consideration not only the number of links to your page that exist out there, but they also care which sites are doing the linking and how popular those sites are.

So the goal is not only to get a lot of other sites to link to yours, but to get popular sites to link to yours.

And thanks to sites like LinkedIn, this is easier than you might think.

Linking from LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals.  When you join, you get to set up a little profile page about yourself.  The difference between LinkedIn and some of the other social networking sites is that LinkedIn profiles are usually very business-oriented, listing people's educational background and work history rather than their favorite movies and photos of their pet chimpanzees.  Once you have your profile page set up, you can get in touch with other users (e.g. your colleagues and business associates), which results in a list of "connections."

LinkedIn is a cool site for you as an individual, but you can also use your membership in LinkedIn to boost your rankings for your business website.  If you have a LinkedIn profile, you can include a link to your company's website on that profile and encourage your "connections" to do the same.  Because LinkedIn is such a popular website, the links on profiles there are going to impress Google and Yahoo a lot more than many other links would, therefore helping out those search engine rankings.

Meet Alexa

Alexa.com is a website that makes a list of all the websites in the whole wide world in order of popularity.  A website's Alexa ranking tells you a lot about how popular it is and, therefore, how strong a link from that site would be.

If you check out the Alexa ranking for LinkedIn, you'll see that it's a really high quality site in terms of popularity.  As I'm writing this, it's ranked #29 in the world, and although the exact number changes often, LinkedIn is always on the short list of very popular sites.

Why Not Do Your Website a Favor?

So by signing up for LinkedIn and adding a link from your profile to your website, you are going to make your website look more favorable in the eyes of the search engines -- in a quick, painless, and FREE way.