Regardless of your feelings towards social networking, you know that having an easily accessible professional profile can only benefit your career. While an accurate, updated, and focused resume is extremely important, networking profiles allow for greater freedom of information sharing.

If you haven’t already, you should take advantage of LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network. When used correctly, LinkedIn can be a valuable resource for you and for the professionals searching your name. However, if you haven’t taken the necessary steps to improve your LinkedIn profile or you are unaware of common LinkedIn mistakes, you will not experience online networking success.

There are many possible explanations for why your LinkedIn profile isn’t proving effective. Listed below are a couple of the most common.

When your name is run through LinkedIn’s search engine, your profile is still hard to locate. There are a couple of possible explanations for this problem. It’s likely that you have a common name. LinkedIn has over 135 million members as of November 3, 2011. Unsurprisingly, searching for a common name will pull up a frustratingly long list of results. To help solve this problem, make sure that your location is specific. If you have made your city and state available, professionals should have an easier time narrowing down the results.

If you find that recruiters are having trouble finding your profile, you might have a different problem. According to Joshua Waldman in “3 LinkedIn Profile Settings You Probably Don’t Know About But Should,” “Many of these advanced social recruiting tools deliver search results for the recruiters based on that person’s individual network.” Therefore, you probably won’t show up in search results if much of your profile is privatized and only shared with your first degree connections.

Your profile isn’t complete. Your profile cannot possibly be at its most effective if it isn’t complete. If you are having trouble fully completing this task on your own, LinkedIn has a status bar that will tell you exactly what you need to do. While this status bar is helpful, it’s up to you to come up with great content.

Just like your resume, your profile should be filled with relevant content that should also describe the impact that you had on each company. Don’t stop after you’ve listed your responsibilities. LinkedIn’s new Skills section is especially a good place to highlight your expertise. Skills are often the first thing recruiters use to search for potential candidates, so keep yours comprehensive, but truthful!

Also, make sure that all of the information that you provide is accurate and up-to-date. It doesn’t look good to other professionals if your profile is missing important elements (including recommendations) and hasn’t been updated since 2010.

How has LinkedIn affected your career? Leave us your stories in the comments!