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

There are many internet marketing resources out there that give out tips and pointers about increasing your website’s rankings and traffic, getting back links, optimizing a PPC campaign, etc. Just do a Google search for “SEO” or “How to get my website ranked in Google” and you will get millions of results. Unfortunately, when you try a search for “How to become an SEO specialist?” you only get websites that offer help in finding a specialist or job postings. There are no resources for those who are wondering how to actually become an SEO engineer. Here are some pointers that I think will be helpful in actually becoming a professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist.

No matter if you want to be a freelance SEO or work for an agency, you will need to first prove (to a prospective client or employer) that you have some knowledge of the Internet Marketing field and show some results in getting websites ranked in Google and other search engines, so lets get started:

STEP 1: Learn the Basics of SEO

This step should be relatively easy. There are many sources out there that will explain what exactly SEO is and what activities are involved. If you prefer books, you can look up some kind of SEO book, like “SEO 101″ or some such, but as I said, all this information is available online. Feel free to read up about the subject on my blog, the SEO and Web Design Guide. To learn the search engine optimization essentials, make sure to read on my article entitled: “Improve Google rankings of your website.”

STEP2: Start a SEO Website

Whether to a prospective client or an employer, you will have to prove that you have some knowledge and experience in the field and what better way to do that if not starting an SEO themed website? Don’t create the website ad hoc – go through the actual Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of the website. Start with the planning phase and have the whole concept ready before you start the design and coding parts. I’m a firm believer that to work in internet marketing you should manage at least one website from grounds up – from design and content writing to SEO and PPC.

STEP3: Get Ranked

Use your newly acquired knowledge to optimize your website – remember to write lots of quality content and get some good inbound links – submit a press release or two. Do your keyword research and decide what phrases to target. Don’t shoot for the stars right at first, pick something that you can achieve relatively quickly just to show some results for your efforts. Target your geographical area. Good keyword examples would be “New York SEO Service”, “Detroit SEO Consultant” or “Florida SEO Freelancer” for instance – Chicago SEO in my case. Rankings for such phrases might not necessarily bring you a ton of traffic but it’s a start and you will have some proof of your SEO skills.

STEP4: Build Your Portfolio

To close a deal with any serious client, you’ll need some references – a nice portfolio might come in handy here. Go for some smaller, less demanding clients for start – the bigger fish will come when you make a mark for yourself. You can help your friends and family with their websites, pro bono or for a small fee – the choice is yours. You can also simply design some websites for yourself and get them ranked (if they start getting some nice traffic, you can always sell them or load them up with AdSense), just to have that portfolio ready.

STEP5: Get Some Leads

By now you should have enough skill and credentials to go out there and get some new clients. Your website can be a valuable source of leads, if you don’t get enough traffic yet, then a Pay-Per-Click network, such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, might be a good source of conversions. PPC campaigns might turn costly, but if you can afford it, then you could kill two birds with one stone. On one hand you’ll be getting clicks from potential customers and on the other you will gain valuable experience and insight into PPC management – a services that you can offer your future clients. Other ways of getting leads include the word of mouth (do as much networking as possible, invest in business cards and be extra nice to your friends and family!), freelance websites (client sends a Request for Proposal and freelancers submit their bids), email blasts (try not to cross the thin line on the border of spam), and cold calls, among others. If you decide on cold calling people, you’ll have to steel your nerves. Many people don’t appreciate being solicited and may have a few unkind words for you or will simply hang up on you, so don’t get discouraged! A good tip for cold calls: look for people that do PPC (sponsored results on the right hand side of search engine result page), if they already spend money for every click then you know that those clicks are important to them and you are about to offer them FREE clicks!

STEP6: Land Those Deals!

When trying to close the deal, make sure the client knows the full benefit package that he’s getting – this will help double time if the client is already doing PPC – they understand the worth of traffic and you’re about to considerably cut their costs. Another important thing is being honest. Don’t try hiding every thing. If the client asks what have you done or what your plans are, be open about it. You can safely disclose your strategy to the client – they’ll defer to your expertise and experience. If you are overly close-mouthed, your client may accuse you of lack of communication or simply lack of service (if you can’t tell them what you’re doing then you probably aren’t doing anything). Besides, the client spends his hard earned money with you, so he or she is entitled to be informed.

STEP7: Do Your Work!

Did you get that deal? Nice, now lets go to work. You should know what to do by now but lets go through it again – do your research (Word Tracker or Google AdWords keyword tool are great resources). Make sure you cover all the basics of on-page optimization: titles, meta tags, headers, bold text and inter-linking will give you basis for your further work. Write some good, keyword rich text but avoid keyword stuffing! Start your link building campaign – submit the site to DMOZ and other directories, start local listings and do a fair amount of link begging (hey, lets be honest…). When the website gets re-crawled – review and reinforce. Remember: content is the king, links are when the king goes to war!

STEP8: Follow-up With Your Client

Make sure that you periodically follow up with your clients. A quick email or a simple call once in a while can do wonders in terms of customer satisfaction. If you’re calling to let them know about some good ranking that you just achieved for them, have them open up Google and type in their keywords and tell you what they see – you may be pleasantly surprised at their reaction! You can always reinforce your emails with an attachment – a nice report from Google Analytics with increased traffic has a way of keeping a client happy.

STEP9: Up-sale

Even the most satisfied clients have room for improvement. A redesign of their website might increase the conversion rate, optimizing their AdWords account may lower their cost per click (CPC), a nice press release may drive significant, and I mean SIGNIFICANT, increase in traffic for a period of time. If you’ve proven yourself to the client and gave him or her a good bang for their buck, they will be willing to listen to you. If you make your case and show them how the additional services that you provide will make them more money, they will go for it. Make them money and they will be more than happy to pay your fees – sky’s the limit!

STEP10: Get Referrals and Update Portfolio

Make sure that you have nice recommendations from your very satisfied client – stick them on your website, update a portfolio and shamelessly take advantage of it when closing a new deal. It is always worth the time and effort to write a nice case study after a successful campaign and upload it to your website – several nice ones and your conversion rate will soar!

STEP11: At this point you should be able to tell which is more feasible for yourself – staying a freelancer (freedom, sweet freedom) or joining an agency (benefits+paid vacation time+sales team handy). By now you should have enough evidence to support your resume to get an agency job without much problem, so the choice is yours!

STEP12: Go back to the first step and go over the cycle again – this time try just a little bit harder. Don’t ever assume you know everything, because there is always room for improvement. There are new techniques and new ways of accomplishing your goals. Look at this as a process of ongoing improvement, we live and learn.

This, in a nutshell, should give you an idea of how to follow (no pun intended) the path of an SEO, whether agency or freelance. Feel free to share your comments and success stories. Good luck!

-Konrad

http://www.kocisz.com

I also seem to be on the first page of Google and Yahoo! for “Chicago SEO” and “Chicago SEO Services”. I think that improving my rankings for those terms would require a little bit of additional link building. That might be hard, considering that I have a regular nine to five job that I have to attend to.

I think I will utilize some blogging skills at first and then focus on my link exchange (maybe eve post a video SEO tutorial on YouTube). For those who don’t know I have set up a link exchange page on my website, so feel free to utilize it if you are in a middle of a link building campaign.

Internet Marketing might be time-consuming and a little tedious at times but I sure as hell am enjoying myself when I do it! That is especially true when I see my or my client’s website pop up number 1 in Google.

I will post an update on this SEO campaign when something moves forward (suggestions are welcome!).

Any other SEO freaks out there? Or maybe potential link exchange partners or clients? If you feel like sharing something, feel free to drop me a line!

Thanks for reading! I promise I will make time to post some new SEO tips for you guys and gals within the next couple of days!

Cheers!

After we fix everything and have a 100% spam free website, we go to Google Webmasters Tools (www.google.com/webmasters). In the Dashboard, on the right hand side, we’ll have messages, and tools. Last on the list is a link called “Request reconsideration.” Note that previously it was called a reinclusion request, but since that was not really true – it’s more than just bans, but also penalties, delistings, etc., they changed it to what it is right now.

So now, how do we write the reconsideration letter itself?

Well, first of all be truthful. If you used an SEO firm, please do state so. I was fixing one site, ant the client had an SEO company do it first. They didn’t get him anywhere, actually they got him banned. What those brains from an undisclosed company did, was to put a PHP script on the bottom of every page (using a global footer) that would go into a loop and generate several hundred of 1px by 1px spacer GIFs that would be a link to one of the subpages and be totally stuffed with keywords in the alternative text attribute of their img src declaration tag. I’ve stated as much, and guess what? Within 4 days my client from ranking nowhere for anything, jumped into #1 position in Google SERP for his targeted keyword (and some other ones as well).

So yes, be honest, tell them what happened, tell them that you’ve fixed it. Also, you better be darn sure to state that you promise never to do that again!

I’ve noticed that some people tend to throw in some reference to their Google adwords or adsense affiliation, thinking that Google’s gonna let them of the hook because they’re doing business together. Well, that’s not gonna fly, so forget about this part.

That would be pretty much it, worked for me. Keep in mind that it may take a while (probably weeks) for Google to do something about your site’s status and if they do they might not even let you know about it. So yeah, monitor the SERPs for your keywords.

Quick recap of what to do when your site gets banned:

Remove all Black Hat practices.

Request reinclusion stating:

What happened?

What did you do to fix it?

Will it ever happen again (better not)?

Hope it helps, thanks for reading!

On-Site Optimization

• Choosing the right domain name

One of the first choices that you have to make when starting your website is the choice of your domain name. This is important because Google and other search engines look at your domain name when determining the relevancy of the search engine results page (SERP). It is therefore beneficial to have the keywords that you are targeting present in your domain name.

• Title

Title of your web page (specified with the use of the <title> tag) should be descriptive and relevant to the content of your website. It is beneficial to include some of the targeted keywords and/or keyphrases in the title of your site. Also, be sure to have unique titles for every each one of your sub-pages, as it is more descriptive and increases the amount of keywords that you can use.

• Keyword density

When writing content for your website, try to include all your keywords within the body of your pages. That way, when a search engine bot (crawler) indexes your website, it sees the keyphrases included in your copy, and thus can determine the relevancy of your website for a given search querry.

• Header tags

Divide the content of your site into certain parts and begin each with a relevant (keyword-rich) description bound by the header tags (h1, h2, h3, etc.).

• Links

Make sure that your site does not have any broken links, for it is frowned upon by the search engines. The anchor text (name that your link is displayed as) should be relevant, and keyword rich. If certain keywords are more important to you, you may increased their value in the eyes of search engines by using one of the bold and strong tags or putting them as a header.

• File names

Make sure that the file names of your web pages contain the targeted keywords. For example instead of calling your gallery page gallery.html, call it fast-cars-photogallery.html (for a gallery of sports cars). Remember not to go overboard with sticking too many keywords into one file name, because it may appear too spamy to search engines.

• Image alternative text.

Remember to include the alternative text for all your images (ex: <img src=”dogpicture.jpg” alt=”Picture of a dog” />). Alt text is important for a variety of reasons: it helps visually disabled people to read your website, helps when somebody is using text only web browser, it is standards compliant, and of course it is yet another place to put some more keywords.

• Meta Data: description, keywords

In your html code, be sure to put adequate, not too long, not too short description of your website and the list of your keywords.

• Url rewriting

Remember that you can manipulate your urls and make them more search engine friendly with such tools as .htaccess on an Apache server or the IIS on a Microsoft platform.

• W3C compliant syntax

Make sure that the html you are coding is compliant with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. You can check your site at validator.w3.org. Some people believe that having valid html helps with your SERP, some think otherwise. In my opinion it is a good prudent and proactive step to take; it won’t hurt, but it may help. I myself, try to always use valid strict xhtml (specified in the doctype statement in the top part of your code).

Off-Site Optimization

• Link building - you can submit your link for free to many websites such as:

• Yahoo & Google Locals

At these sites you can submit your business listing, and not only get a valuable link from an important, high PR site, but also increase your brand awareness and potentially land some business deals.

• Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo Directories (paid listing), etc.)

There is an abundance of online directories floating on the internet. Some of them are free such as DMOZ (very hard to get listed, but extremely beneficial to your SEO and eMarketing efforts), some offer paid inclusion (Yahoo directories, I think annual fee of $290), and some offer you a listing in exchange for a link back to their site. Be careful with linking to those directories because some might be treated as link-farms and will get you penalized by the search engines. If linking to a directory, find out if it is a legitimate website first. Also, try linking only to those sites that are related to yours in some way.

• Video sharing (Youtube.com, Google Videos, etc.)

If you have some skills at shooting interesting videos or making video tutorials (such as a SEO tutorial or a witty Photoshop technique tutorial) you can post them on a variety of video-sharing networks, and put a link to your website in the description of your input.

• Social Networking (MySpace.com, Facebook.com, etc.)

Social networking sites are a great way to show of your business along with your website to the world. A profile on MySpace or Facebook can gain you new clients, help to stay in touch with existing ones, develop business relations with other companies, and be a source of links and traffic to your website.

• Blogs (blogger.com, wordpress.com, etc.)

Blogs, similarly to social networking sites, are a good way of sharing information about your business/website with the world. By writing relevant content, you can gain links and exposure

• Message boards, forums
• Digg.com
• Wikipedia.org
• Google Pages
• Link Exchange

• Email Marketing/Newsletter

A company online newsletter can keep your visitors updated and in touch with your website. Marketing emails can also attract possible clients for your business. If you decide to engage in an email marketing campaign, keep one thing in mind: “Don’t SPAM!”

I will be posting new techniques and tips for search engine optimization, as well as discussing the ones contained in this article in more detail, so stay tuned!

Thanks for visiting my blog!

-Konrad