In this blog, we will look into several tips that will help you increase your LinkedIn profile's visibility and keep it professional.

Importance of profile picture

To begin, let's understand why it's so important to have a profile picture on your LinkedIn profile. If someone looks at your profile and sees your profile picture blank, trust me, it won't have a positive impact on you. Without a profile picture, your profile won't be authentic.

Hence, ensure you have a photo of yourself that shows you smiling or appearing happy. Your profile should have a good attitude. So, just in case, if you appear upset or too worried, it generally doesn't convey a favorable message. Therefore, be sure to smile.

The photo should appear somewhat professional, but it can also be informal. Make sure you're not at a wedding or other event where people can immediately, additionally, make sure your face is visible in the photo. So, make sure you add a profile photo; it's a crucial component that I see is missing from many profiles.

Tips for Profile, Headline & Summary section

Moving on to the Headline, which is typically the area where the job title appears.  The phrase "looking for opportunities" shouldn't appear in your header when you are looking for a job. If you include that in your headline, recruiters won't even look at your profile. So, stay away from it.

It's important to note that just because you don't work in the job area that you'd like, doesn't mean you aren't qualified for it. If you have the title of "software engineer", but aren't employed by a company, that's fine.

If you're coding every day and expanding your skill sets, you're still a software engineer. It doesn't matter if you're working at a company as a software engineer or not.

The next section is the summary, where you can provide a brief overview of yourself or your knowledge. Now, having a long summary can be difficult to read. Instead, break things down into an outline.

Begin with your position title and then list technologies that you are pretty proficient in. If you studied a particular technology and want a job in that field, make sure you mention that right at the top of your profile so recruiters can see it right away.

The experience section follows a summary. Some students might not have experience because they are still in college. So, for these students, I recommend checking out upwork.com or freelancer.com, which are websites for freelancers.

And you can sign up as a freelancer, and you can look up jobs and get consulting gigs where you can be paid to do things like software development.

This will enable you to put your experience as a software developer. And it looks much better than leaving it blank. Make sure you include as much detail as possible about the jobs you've worked in. Include those technical keywords near the top of your profile as well as in some of the job specifications.

Skills and endorsements

Next comes the skills and endorsements section, where you can add a new skill by mentioning the course type and URL of the certificate. If you've completed the course, please share your certificate with your friends and community and which will help them to endorse your skill. List all the skills that you are comfortable with here, and ask your colleagues and classmates to endorse you on those skills.

Connections and Google Ranking

I would also recommend you connect with as many people as possible. As I have found that the more people I connected with, the higher my profile is ranked. You must keep things professional on LinkedIn.

Add something relevant to your career to your LinkedIn profile if you have something professional, nice, motivating, or motivational to say. Make sure you share it with as many people as you can. The more people that see your name, the higher your search engine rankings will be.

Never undersell yourself

So before concluding this blog, I want to mention the most important thing to remember when marketing yourself on LinkedIn, which is to never undersell yourself.

In my professional experience, I have seen many people who have worked for 20 years, developing software professionally, but are still not as capable as someone with only two or three years of experience.

As a programmer, it's all about challenging yourself and writing lots of code. If you are in another profession, such as business analysis, database development, or network engineering, make sure you master the profession and skills that you are working on.

In the end, it's not about the number of years someone has, it's about the knowledge they have acquired and the amount of effort they've put forth.

So, those tips were the key takeaways from this blog. Make sure you use them next time when you are planning to boost your LinkedIn profile.

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About the Author

Imtiaz Ahmad is an award-winning Udemy Instructor who is highly experienced in big data technologies and enterprise software architectures. Imtiaz has spent a considerable amount of time building financial software on Wall St. and worked with companies like S&P, Goldman Sachs, AOL and JP Morgan along with helping various startups solve mission-critical software problems. In his 13+ years of experience, Imtiaz has also taught software development in programming languages like Java, C++, Python, PL/SQL, Ruby and JavaScript. He’s the founder of Job Ready Programmer — an online programming school that prepares students of all backgrounds to become professional job-ready software developers through real-world programming courses.