“Backlinks are the same for your SEO strategy as the backbone is to your body.”
Whether you are an SEO expert or not, if you have a website, you must have heard about backlinks. A backlink may also be referred to as an inbound link, which is a link coming from another website and leading to yours, or whatever the target may be.
Let’s say you have some extraordinary content which someone with a website finds valuable enough to link to.If they link to your website, and their website has a high domain authority, some of that authority gets passed on to your site. You basically get two benefits from this link; link "juice", referring to domain authority that gets passed on to your site, and any traffic the backlink brings to your website. Pages with a large number of high quality backlinks tend to rank well in Google search results.
What are .edu Backlinks?
To begin with, a .edu is a top-level domain (TLD) used by educational institutes. When such a website links to one of your web pages, you get a .edu backlink, which from an SEO perspective is pretty powerful. It can help your website attain higher search rankings by improving your site's domain authority. For this reason, .edu backlinks are a powerful tool for any SEO Specialist to add to their arsenal! These links are not easy to get.
One of the most important strategies in off-site search engine optimization is link building. Getting links from high value targets like universities can be extremely difficult, considering their value. The good news is that there are ways to get these highly coveted backlinks, without breaking the bank! Below is a starter list with 5 different techniques some SEO's use to get .edu backlinks.
1) Become a Teacher or Guest Lecturer
If you are a subject matter expert, then you can teach at a local college based on your experience. Educational institutes are always eager for guest lecturers who can speak about their niche and provide practical, real-life guidance to students.
By getting a guest lecturer position, you can help students while branding yourself as an authority in your field. Most likely the school you lecture at will give you a profile page where you can add a backlink to your website.
Also, if you are a one time or infrequent guest speaker, your lectures may be mentioned in the school's blog or on the events page, which can include a backlink to your website. If it doesn't, you can certainly request this option from the administration in charge of this. Lecturing at a school is like canned networking: you have a captive audience for an hour and a half, and you can give everyone there your web address, which will have the residual effect of increasing your website traffic, another thing Google loves!
2) Network with Professors
This is a time-consuming strategy, but it can pay off with big dividends if you are patient and persistent enough! To start off with, look for professors who actively maintain /update their profile pages, and may be active in the school blog or on other educational networks. Start visiting their blogs, biography and resource pages. Make it a point to connect with them on social media, in particular Linkedin, and engage in their posts. Nothing is more flattering than when someone "likes", shares and comments on your social media posts. It's a great way to warm the waters.
Once you have connected with a few professors on social media, and built the foundation of an online relationship by engaging with their posts, send them a message asking for their advice on a topic they often mention.
You may want to invite a professor to be a guest speaker on your podcast. This way you get to interview a pro, and they will certainly mention you to their colleagues and perhaps their students as well.
Maybe you can offer to do a joint project which their students can participate in, if it relates to your field. You'd then go on to blog about the project, and ask the professor and their students to link to the article. Don't forget- some students are active on student blogs also.
You see where this is going? You get involved with professors at a college that teach classes in your area of expertise, and you find a way to add value to their curriculum. If you can do this, you are likely to get some valuable links from the school.
3) Pitch Students with .edu Blogs
Many of us love to write about our opinions, and many colleges offer students a chance to do this on their own blogs.
There might be some Ph.D. students with blogs on their main research topics.
You can benefit from these blogs by finding a way to connect to the students authoring them and get them to link back to your website. One way to do this would be to offer them an opportunity to guest post on your blog. If they do, they will certainly want to show off their post, and most likely link to it from their .edu blog. It's a win/win situation.
You can also take advantage of social media to find students to network with and start the ball rolling. If worst comes to worst, you can offer students money to write an article for you in their student blog.
4) Create a Scholarship or Make a Charitable Donation
Now this one can turn out to be an expensive proposition. While your main goal might be to get a valuable backlink from an educational institution, you will also be helping a student. It's a worthy cause which can only benefit your brand in the long run.
Most of us probably remember the phrase attributed to the Godfather, in the movie, “I'm gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Well, that's what you're doing here: you're making a student a scholarship offer they can't refuse. In return, you'll get a backlink from the school's financial aid page, which is a .edu link. This is an ethical way to spend money buying links.
You create a scholarship for deserving students or offer a charitable donation to improve a college library or lab. You then create a page on your website detailing the initiatives for the students and/or the institute, and they will put a link back to your website on their sponsor's page or financial page.
5) Offer Discounted Services To Staff and Students
You can offer a product or service that is of interest to students or staff of an educational institute, which will be mutually beneficial as well.
Start off by creating special discount offers for students and college/university staff. After all, who doesn't like a good discount?!
You will create an offer page on your website that they can link back to, and even mention in the student newspaper or events/resources section of their website. You might even want to reach out the college you're making the offer to beforehand, and ask what they prefer.
In Conclusion
We hope that these tips will help you get quality .edu backlinks. And remember, getting .edu backlinks, or other valuable backlinks for that matter, is not the "be all" and "end all" to your marketing equation, but it certainly is a big part of it.
If you need any help building high value backlinks, designing your website, optimizing it for search engines, email marketing or PPC campaigns, please feel free to visit our website at https://iDesignYours.com. We'd love to help you out.
