Our featured guest blogger, Sima Dahl is President of Parlay Communications, a social media strategist, trainer, and speaker. Her firm provides integrated social marketing strategy and implementation to business-to-business and professional service firms. 

You can like it, you can love it, but you can’t ignore LinkedIn. Arguably the most professional of all the social networks, having a polished and keyword-optimized LinkedIn profile is critical in the Age of Referral. If you haven’t logged in lately, here are seven updates to make to your profile today.

1. Optimize Your Headline

Your LinkedIn headline need not be your job title. Instead, consider using keywords or phrases that describe who you are, what you do, and why you’re special. 

2. Add Skills & Expertise

The Skills section of LinkedIn is still in beta but it’s rapidly growing. This section allows prospects, hiring managers and recruiters to search on a keyword, such as “online marketing”, and quickly uncover the people who can get the job done. It’s also a clever way for you to benchmark your competition. 

3. List Your Honors & Awards

No one can see that fancy Blogger of the Year plaque hanging in your office but you. Now LinkedIn offers a designated place to list your honors. Don ‘t be shy – if ever there was a time to brag, this is it. Recent grad? Consider adding the new Test Scores section instead. 

4. Customize Your Public Profile URL

Did you know that Google indexes your LinkedIn profile? That’s right - each page has a unique URL, but you can easily customize it to underscore your personal brand. Mine is LinkedIn.com/in/simasays. Once you have a custom URL, drop it into your email signature. It’s a subtle way to encourage people to check out your profile and get connected. You can easily see who’s been spying on you but clicking Who’s Viewed Your Profile, found in the lower right hand corner from the Home page. 

5. Include Twitter (only if you tweet)

LinkedIn has a field for you to include your Twitter handle in your profile. This is perfect for people who tweet. However, if you are not an active user or you keep your tweets private, consider skipping this field altogether. For the socially savvy, there’s little worse than clicking that hyperlink to check out your Twitter stream only to hit a dead end.  

6. Reorder Overlapping Experience

Many professionals wear more than one hat, and now LinkedIn allows you to determine the order in which they appear. For example, if you’ve just been named the President of your local SMC chapter and wish to showcase that on your profile, you can add it to your experience then pull it under whatever other job you want to pop up first. 

7. Update Your Status

Use your status to remind people who you are, what you do, and why you’re special. I recommend updating your status just once a week because unlike Facebook and Twitter, most members do not log in daily. Rather than pulling in your latest tweet, write something for just LinkedIn, sans hashtags and @ symbols which are little more than noise in this channel.

To connect with our guest blogger on Twitter visit, @SimaSays.