As a business person or owner, you’re always looking for ways to grow your audience and increase your visibility online. While there are many ways to increase visibility, posting articles on LinkedIn is among the most effective for growing your audience within the platform and on search engine organic searches.
LinkedIn makes long-form articles posted on the platform visible to search engine crawlers. Unlike articles published on websites, however, it was impossible to add specific title tags and metadata descriptions until recently.
According to an article on Search Engine Land, LinkedIn users can now customize their article SEO titles and metadata description for improved visibility on search engines.
Similar to Metadata for Other Articles
The new update on LinkedIn allows users to customize the metadata for their articles, similar to articles on websites. Metadata is a short description of a page and includes the meta title and the meta description.
The meta title, which includes the page’s title, should have no more than 65 characters. The meta description, which briefly summarizes the page, should be under 155 characters, including spaces.
Instead of meta title and meta description, the two new fields go by the names SEO title and SEO description on LinkedIn.
How to Add the Two Fields
To add the two new fields to your articles, click on “write a new article,” go to the publishing menu, and then click “settings.” Under settings, you will find two fields: SEO title and SEO description.
You will have 60 characters to work with in the SEO title section, five characters less than you would have for a meta title for articles on a website. LinkedIn will use your SEO title instead of your article title in the SERPs. This means the title of your article can be different from what a user sees on the search results, although the two must be related. For example, the SEO title can be a compressed version of the article title if the title has more than 60 characters.
The SEO description section gives you 160 characters to describe what your article is about. According to LinkedIn, this summary will appear under your title in the SERPs instead of the traditional first line of your article. When used correctly, the SEO description can help increase the number of people who click on your article, widening your reach.
Other Changes
Besides the SEO title and description update, LinkedIn can also increase newsletters’ prominence in search results. With the new changes, creators that offer newsletters will have them appear under the author’s name alongside a subscribe button, which is a huge plus for businesses seeking to expand their contact list.
Another new LinkedIn feature is improved video accessibility that automatically generates captions when a user uploads a video. This feature also allows the user to edit the captions before publishing. This feature is available for English videos only–the platform has not yet announced when it will be available for other languages.
Other new features in the lineup include standard accessibility job titles, the ability to add alt text functionalities in images used in ads, job search updates, and B2B product search updates. To learn more about LinkedIn updates and how they may affect your SEO strategy, contact BluShark Digital today.