I wrote an Active Rain Tutorial on how you should be using your first and last name fields for SEO strength. You can read the SEO in your name post by clicking here. I suggest that you take care of your first and last name before you move on to this post on optimizing your Active Rain Profile.

When you are on your MY HOME page you will see a link on the left sidebar under the new blog links that says MY PROFILE ( EDIT).

Click the EDIT link and it will take you to your profile area. Here is where you make your changes and add content to your profile page.

If you don't like to see a lot of email in your inbox or have a hard time organizing all your emails I would suggest that you get a free gmail account to use for your Active Rain home page or just use a new email box within your Outlook.

Next, add your website addresss that you want consumers to go to.

We will go over more about choosing URLs, website addresses in my SEO To The Top Webinar.

I just noticed that I have not changed our URL since joining. We have a great keyword rich URL that we now own. I am going to go in to change that URL now.

After the phone numbers there is one line that has the EDIT ADDRESS link right next to it. Click this link and put in a complete snail mail address or a postal box complete with city, state and zip code. Please make sure it is an address that mail will get to you. If you work for a brand name company then you need to add that name to the address in line 1 because your mail will not get to you with just your name on it in most cases. I know because we send out letters of appreciation to our subscribers each Christmas and I am getting a lot of return to sender mail. When you move, please go back in here and change your address so it is updated. We have over 1100 subscribers but only 600 had addresses to mail our letter out to. Out of the 600 we sent out we are still getting letters back marked as undeliverable.

The next section is your Description section. In here you will add a description about your area and what is in it for the consumer. Make sure to add your keywords in this section in a nice flowing style that does not appear like you are trying to just get your keywords found by Google. You know the look! Stay away from looking like that.

There is a 200 character limit in the Description so choose your words wisely.

On the right side of your profile page you will see a PRIMARY MARKET box. Here you will add your state and county. When you get ready to choose your town or city you want to make sure that people are actually looking for your town or city. Just because you live in your town and love your town does not mean that others love your town as much as you do.

We will cover more about this SEO Tips in our SEO To The Top Webinar.

Make sure you upload your photo here too. No one wants to develop a relationship with those who do not show their face! I want to know who I am networking with and consumers want to know the same also.

Then click on SAVE PROFILE.

Save your work often. It is such a bummer to not have saved your work only to be kicked out of the system and having to start all over again. You can go back and change things as you learn to get better at what you should be writing about and what words to use on your profile page.

We will continue this topic in another post so stay tuned. We will cover writing the 3 sections underneath the profile section we just covered.

Follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/CoachKaterina.

Active Rain Profiles- How To Get Mileage From Your Active Rain Profiles by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.