LinkedIn can be one of your strongest business resources, but you first need to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

There are hundreds of millions of users on LinkedIn, the majority of whom do the bare minimum when building their profile. There are the basics that are needed in order to get started, but for many, that (or a step or two later) is where the process ends. LinkedIn is not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get model, like, for example, Twitter.

There are numerous fields that can be used to optimize your LinkedIn profile, and this set of tips should help get you started on the right track.

1. Tell People Who You Are

Sure, your name and (possibly) place of employment are on LinkedIn from the get-go, but people want to know more about you. So tell them!

LinkedIn features sections for everything from your education history to a list of publications. The more impressive information you can feed to your LinkedIn profile the better your results will be. Furthermore, this is an opportunity to showcase your expertise to an audience of professionals more so than on any other network. The LinkedIn profile is a truly a medium for self-promotion, and since those are so few and far between in the world of social media, we suggest you use it as much as possible.

2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for SEO

LinkedIn is a miniature search engine…of one billion annual searches. While this might be a tiny fraction of the searches done on monster engines like Google, it is still significant, and each of the searches done on LinkedIn are within a very narrowed scope. Therefore, it is very important that you optimise your LinkedIn profile for search purposes.

LinkedIn – like Google or Facebook’s EdgeRank – has the Relevance algorithm. This is the criteria by which search results are ordered. While most people are searching for someone or something in particular, there are still those looking for broader results, like “Manhattan Real Estate Agent” or “San Francisco Caterer”. Though the top results will always be first-degree connections followed by second- and third-degree, you will certainly  want to optimize your profile for keywords.

According to an article by blogging4jobs.com, the most relevant areas in which to place keywords are your name, headline, company name, job title and skills.

3. Seek Out Endorsements

Once again, LinkedIn is a medium for self-promotion. Now that does not mean that you should not be engaging in the conversation, but it does mean that you can actively pursue help from your network to grow your business through LinkedIn.

One of the best credibility criteria on LinkedIn is also one of its newest features: endorsements. Though people know that endorsements are not necessarily the most trustworthy measurement for credibility (just like asking for friends to ‘Like’ your Facebook page, you can do the same with LinkedIn) a large number of endorsements for different skills (and you should fill out all 50 that you are given) does look impressive and does hold some clout when you are leading the conversation.

4. Engage in the Conversations

You are allowed to be a member of 50 groups. There is no excuse for anyone not be a member of 50 groups. With over 1.6 million groups, you will be hard pressed to find a forum in which you cannot participate in the conversation. And that is one of the most powerful features of LinkedIn.

Engagement can mean several things including increased visibility, increased traffic and increased credibility. You might have an impressive profile filled with links to your blog or website, but with hundreds of millions of people talking, you are pretty tough to find organically. By engaging in the conversation and starting some of your own, you increase the likelihood of being found and getting the most out of LinkedIn.

Some of these tips may seem intuitive, but the reality is that few people are actually taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. To really boost your activity and the success you are seeing from LinkedIn, implement some of these tips and see how quickly you derive the benefits of LinkedIn.

What other tips can you think of that can help with optimizing a LinkedIn profile? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!