I always review the LinkedIn profile of people I am meeting / networking with, doing business with, etc.  The things I look for are a sense of who is working at the company, do they have good recommendations, do they have a trustworthy background, etc.  In other words a LinkedIn profile can be a great way for me to determine how well I "trust" the person I am dealing with.

Conversely, your LinkedIn profile gives YOU a great opportunity to try and build trust quickly with the people that want to do business with YOU!

So here are my recommendations for optimizing your LinkedIn profile:

1.  Have everyone in your company create a profile and link them to the company.

2.  Solicit recommendations from all your clients from within LinkedIn

3.  Make sure your title accurate and "client friendly"

4.  Always use a professional photo of a person, NOT a logo!

5.  List the 4-5 bullet points as to what makes this person a great asset to the company and how he/she can help clients working with you.
6.  Get a professional executive resume writer to optimize the content of your profile.  I HIGHLY recommend Holly Reslink at EmpowerLink.  She optimized mine!  http://linkedin.com/in/pmsteil

Also, here are 8 more LinkedIn Optimizations to look at from the Social Examiner:

Webmaster Level: All

Just in time for the holidays the Webmaster Tools team has updated the "Search queries" and "Links to your site" features.

Search queries with top pages:
Throughout the past year we’ve made some significant changes to the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. We've received lots of feedback about this tremendously popular feature. One frequent request we heard was that people wanted to be able to see search queries data for their site’s individual pages. Well we totally agreed that this would be useful and promptly set out to add this functionality to search queries. The fruits of our effort have finally ripened enough on the vine and are ready for you to enjoy. Now when you visit the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools you'll see a new tab titled "Top Pages". The "Top Pages" tab lists impression, click, and position data for the top pages on your site based on their performance in Google's search results.


If you click on one of the individual pages listed you’ll see a list of the queries driving traffic to that page along with impressions and number of clicks for each query.


Just like in the "Top queries" view, you can click on a specific query to see more detailed data and evaluate how the query is performing across the whole site.


To make filtering in search queries even easier, we've added pie charts to show visually the proportions of search type, location and traffic. Also in the "Top queries" view, you can now specify “containing” or “not containing” when filtering queries.


Links to your site with intermediate links:
Links to your site now shows when a particular URL redirects. If there's a link to your site that links to URL1 which then redirects to URL2, we are now showing the link from URL1 to URL2 as an intermediate link. We also added a "Download all links" option to all the tables in the links to your site feature.


Now that you know about these updates, please take a few minutes to check them out for your site. We hope it will provide you with a little bit of extra joy this holiday season. Let us know what you think by submitting a comment here or posting in our Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Holidays from the Webmaster Tools team!

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst