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If those profiles are crawled by spiders from search engines and have the option of putting a link to a website inside them it may be worth spending a bit of time SEO'ing them.
Have you ever done that? Today I took SEO into consideration for the first time ever in creating a profile.
(I don't think there is much room for doing SEO in profiles here at WebmasterWorld. :) )
There is no doubt that a significant amount of people spend time in forums and other communities for one reason: marketing. Perhaps this marketing is mainly directed at human readers, but it is also in many cases put there to be spidered by search engines.
WebmasterWorld and presumably most other web communities take technical and editorial measures against abuse on this field as they rightly should, but I do not believe that this fact should hinder us from using a modest degree of SEO in profiles where appropriate.
If you have several equally good and true words to choose among when you create a profile I cannot see anything wrong in choosing those that would fit best into your general strategy for your presence on the web.
My chief concern is discretion- I don't want to inadvertently tip off a client's competition as to my thinking, so I'd rather stay under the radar.
What good is your profile for?
I like to think of it as a place for personal expression, a business card, and as a point of contact.
Aside perhaps from getting a website initially spidered, I think SEO-ing a profile might be beyond it's practical use.
I had to clear out a two hundred fake users with porn sites in their profile on a brand new board. The more visible it is...well...the more visible it is, good and bad.
