Social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo and MySpace, can help in your search engine optimization efforts because your profiles (personal and/or business) show up in search engine results and include links pointing to your corporate site that may boost its organic rankings.  LinkedIn offers the most bang for the proverbial buck, so we'll cover that today and other social networking sites next time.

Nearly every professional has a profile on LinkedIn these days.  And these profiles rank high in the search engine results -- run a search for your name, and unless you've got a very common name, your LinkedIn profile should be in the top 10. 

More about your personal LinkedIn profile: 

• Include search terms in the copy (in your summary, experience, etc.).
• You can include links to up to three websites.  After clicking on the "Edit My Profile" tab, click on the "[Edit]" link to the right of the sites.  You'll see a drop-down box that gives you options for what type of site this is ("My Website," "My Blog," etc.).  Choose the bottom option, "Other:".  In the box immediately to the right of this, add the description of your site -- with search terms in it!  Mine says "Search Engine Marketing Firm" and it's a link pointing to the Prominent Placement website.
• To summarize benefits, this content will appear in the search engine results, you can control the link text, and the links do pass "link juice" along to your site.

More about your business LinkedIn profile: 

• Include search terms in the copy (in the company description, etc.).
• You can include one link to your corporate website, but unfortunately, you can't change the link text on business profiles.
• To summarize benefits, this content will appear in the search engine results and the links do pass "link juice," but you can't control the link text.

If you do nothing else, you should set up and optimize both types of LinkedIn profiles.  More on other social networking sites next time.