LinkedIn is becoming a more common tool than ever, with an explosion of invites in the UK. Whilst it doesn't have the popularity of some of the other more "fashionable" social media tools such as Myspace and Facebook, it is a useful business tool, filling a niche for business networking rather than your friends.

Whilst the most obvious way to use LinkedIn is for its networking abilities (never lose touch with a contact when you change companies again!), it is also a great tool for research. If you have to meet someone at a company, for a sales pitch perhaps, or even an interview, then a quick search on LinkedIn will usually bring up some great background information. Get an idea of company structure or what areas someone's job covers or even how many people there are in the company.

However, this is an SEO blog, so I also need to give you a tip on how to use LinkedIn to promote your website. I found this great pointer at GetFound and it leverages the strength and trust of the linkedin.com domain to link to your own site.

Here are the instructions to set this up:

Click My Profile Tab in the top navigation

Scroll down to the "Additional Information" box towards the bottom of the Profile and click Edit.

Change the website Type to "Other". This allows you to set your own link anchor text. You don't have very many characters to work with, but there should be enough. Click Save Changes when done.

Now click Edit My Public Profile

In the first box ‘Your Public Profile URL', click Edit.

Change the address to something that better represents you (I used my name :-). Note that it checks this for uniqueness, so if you try using keywords you might have to get creative! Click Set Address.

In the second box ‘Public Profile', click Full View.

Tick which elements of your profile you want to be world visible. However, the important one to make sure you include here is "Websites".

Save Changes.

Preview the page by clicking "View My Public Profile as others see it"

Now you are all done, you just need to link to your page from somewhere else so that the search engines can find it. An ideal place for this is a blog that doesn't use NOFOLLOW on its comment links. Remember also that you can link your profiles together, so link to your public LinkedIn profile from your Facebook page!