There’s an extremely underrated little feature of LinkedIn that will help you build up all-important quality links. But before I get into that, let’s make sure we’re all clear about what I’m referring to when I mention “quality links.”

These are links to you from reliable, trusted Web sites. They boost your search engine visibility and potentially drive traffic your way, so they’re quite valuable. But most people miss an opportunity to add a handful of quality links from the business networking site, LinkedIn.

Most everyone reading this already has a LinkedIn profile, so we’ll skip straight to the quality links secret. But if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, consider setting that up to be Tip No. 1.

This will probably work best if you read this post side-by-side (or tab-by-tab) with your LinkedIn profile page, so here’s the LinkedIn login for your convenience. Now, select “Edit My Profile” and then look at the main text box outlined in blue. We’re concerned with those last two sections “Websites” and “Public Profile.”

Let’s begin with the “Websites” tip. You have the opportunity to set three links:

  • My Company
  • My Blog
  • My RSS Feed

If someone clicks on “My Company,” it will take them, presumably, to your company Web site. The problem is the words “My Company” are generic and don’t reflect the content of the site to which they link. There are untold thousands of profiles that have a link that also says “My Company”, so those links do you no good.

What we’re going to do is change that default text to a keyword phrase relevant to your business, creating a valuable quality link in the process. So, click “edit” to the right of “My Company.” Under “Websites,” select “Other” from the drop-down menu. When “Other” is selected, you can type in whatever link text you want (up to 30 characters).

I changed my link text to read, “Free Daily SEO Tips,” which links to … surprise … the Bay Area Search Engine Academy’s Free Daily SEO Tips site page. You can repeat variations of this trick with the two other allowed links, which default to “My Blog” and “My RSS Feed.” You have a lot of freedom to play with this. You can have all three links point to the same site – just to different pages that relate to different keyword phrases. And because your profile is public, Google picks it up and sees relevant links that match the content on the page it’s going to.

There’s one more thing you can do along the same lines, which is to change your Public Profile link from the default to a keyword phrase. Just use the same steps.

Those two techniques do get picked up by Google and can be used to drive extra traffic to your site. And anytime you can pick up these kinds of links, it’s pure gold. So, plug in the new LinkedIn information, save the changes and enjoy some additional quality links.