Chicago SEO and Web Design Guide

How to get .edu links?

Together with content, links are the most important factor for your website’s search engine success. Of course, some links have much greater value than others. Due to their scarcity, incoming links from pages on .gov and .edu domains have [arguably] more value than those coming from the regular .com’s, .net’s, etc. So, how to get .EDU links? Fortunately, just because something is scarce doesn’t mean that we cannot get it.

The easiest way to get links from .edu domains are student pages. Many universities allow small hosting spaces on their servers for students’ use. As of yet, Google doesn’t [once again arguably] distinguish between an ‘actual’ university website and a student homepage, so those links are gold for an SEO.

Is your son or daughter currently attending a college or university? If so, get them to request a student page from the school’s IT department. Even if a given college doesn’t have the student page program, maybe they’re willing to start one if propped just right. If you’re not a student yourself, maybe your alma mater has an alumni program that could offer you an opportunity to score a link? It won’t hurt to ask and the benefit may very well be worth it!

If that option is not open to you, befriend some college students! Keep in mind that students usually share two characteristics: they all like beer and most of them are usually broke. A six-pack or two of beer may be just enough “motivation” needed to get you that .edu link. Alternatively, you could sign up for a short web design class – student’s need servers to practice their newfound HTML (read: “A HREF”) skills, right? Sometimes community colleges offer free continuing education classes – who knows maybe you can also learn something new (or send your child there to learn ).
There are of course other ways – some more legitimate, some less – of getting .edu links. These include but are not limited to:

• Posting comments to existing blogs and guestbooks on universities’ websites. Can’t find one? You can use Google advanced operators such as:

Keyword+inurl:blog site:.edu or Keyword+inurl:guestbook site:.edu

• - You can also do some competitive research and lookup which of your competitors has some and try to figure out how they got them. Once again search operators come in handy, just use Yahoo! and type in:

linkdomain:www.your-competitors-website.com site:edu – I recommend using Yahoo! instead of Google because it gives you more in-depth data about incoming links without access to one’s Webmaster Tools account.

• Give a seminar on your area of expertise, they may be more than happy to link to your website from the school’s news and events page.
• Offer a free redesign to a professor.

There are some other techniques on obtaining .edu and .gov links, but those are more on the “grey” side or outright “black hat” and shouldn’t be included within the scope of this article.

Hope it helps somebody!

-Konrad

http://www.kocisz.com