It can be incredibly useful in furthering your objectives of Building a Personal Internet Presence to create a content rich profile on one or more networking platforms (e.g., "Ecademy Profile: John Doe") that search engines index and rank high in search returns.
Uh - or not.
It's another thing for people to know this search engine return hit actually refers to - you - (i.e., it's - your - profile) as opposed to the millions of other John Doe related documents the search engine indexes.
Ecademy is - extremely powerful - as compared to other networking platforms in this regard.
There are some very simply, non-technical, things you can do to optimizing your Ecademy Profile for search engines that will make a strong connection between - you - and your Ecademy Profile.
All search engines display the actual "hit" text differently.
Search on my name - ron bates - (or just click the screen shot links I've provided here) in Google, MSN, and Yahoo, and take note of what each search engine displays as the "hit text" for Ecademy Profile: Ron Bates.
You'll notice that each search engine displays different "hit" text. Yahoo for example displays the first part of your 50 words. That's why I put "Ron Bates - Expert in Mission Critical Retained Search" as the first "word" of my 50 words in my Ecademy Profile.
Why would I care about this?
Just because - I - make the mental connection that Ecademy Profile: Ron Bates actually is referring to me, it doesn't mean other people will know that the - Ron Bates - this hit refers to is actually - me - as opposed to the 1,800,000 other - Ron Bates - hits in Yahoo, the 419,898 hits in MSN, or the 5,030,000 hits in Google.
Why is this useless? Because there is no way to tell by looking at the "hit text" that this hit actually has anything to do with - me - as opposed to the 1,800,000 other - Ron Bates - hits in Yahoo, the 419,898 hits in MSN, or the 5,030,000 hits in Google.
I'm the most connected person in the world on www.LinkedIn.com, but I'm invisible on the Internet as far as the value of LinkedIn's recently introduced "public" profiles LinkedIn are concerned.
Google (which is the first search engine an Ecademy Profile typically starts to rank high in) displays the first few lines of the text portion of your profile, as does MSN, but Yahoo actually displays the first part of your 50 words.
It can take about 3-4 weeks typically depending on the spider cycle of the search engine to pick up any changes you make, cache them, and have them actually display in the "hit text", so be patient.
You can obviously leverage this in different ways depending on the objectives behind your profile. If you want to be found by recruiters for example, you might consider using a few "key words" in in the right places in your profile such as:
"Resume - VP Operations", "Semiconductor Industry", "Texas Instruments", etc.
By doing this in key locations within your profile, search engines will index and cache and show this information in the actual "hit text" that is displayed. I'm not a search engine optimization expert by any means. I do know these simple changes in your Ecademy Profile dramatically increase the value of actually having your Ecademy Profile rank high in search engine returns and further your objectives of Building a Personal Internet Presence.
