I’m not a professional link builder neither an SEO expert but yet I have developed some link building techniques that I would love to share and discuss with you guys. Our company mostly works with low budget clients and that make our work even harder, especially in link building. That taught us that we should spend more time thinking on how to get better links than spending money to the easy paid links.
I will share with you a guide that I created from a personal experience that will help you gain quality backlinks from universities and other education websites. Unfortunately the following guide will not work for all industries but I believe it can work with a lot of cases. The good thing is that following this guide you will understand that is not necessary to be a Brand or a well-established company in order to get a link from a university website. Instead you can referred from a University website if you have something valuable to offer to them.
Step 1: Find the correct place
Find a university, school or college that teaches something relevant to the website you are doing SEO. You will first need to find the specific department and then find the specific course that fits you most.
For example, if you are making SEO for a client that is providing Property Law services, you should find universities that have a Law department and then find a course that talk about Property Law. If you are making SEO for a Software Development company then look for universities that have a Computer Science department and find a course about programming or C++ for example. When you are done with your research you should gather a list of the websites with the courses that are relevant to your industry.
Step 2: Find the assistant lecturer
Never contact the main lecturer or the secretary of the department. You should find the assistant lecturer, that’s your man! Why? Because it’s much easier to talk and negotiate with and in most cases he is the one responsible for updating the course’s website content and slides. So he will be your guy for the job.
Step 3: Make the offer
Now it’s the good part. After you have made your research on the course you should be able to offer to the assistant lecture something. If you do not manage to find something useful to offer like the points I suggest below then don’t bother getting in touch with him/her. Below are some of the different approaches you can use to negotiate with the Assist Lecturer in order to succeed your goals. You can start with the easiest one and then move forward to the next one if it’s being declined
– Provide notes
Check the notes used in course from their website, trying to find something that might be missing. After you find it, offer to provide a presentation of it and ask for a link to your site as a reward. The content you will offer to provide must not be commercial and offer real value to the course and the students. The slideshow might be a bonus or an abstract to the main presentations.
– Add something to the resources section
Visit the resources section of the course and you will probably find a lot of links to various wiki sites and publications. Review them and figure out something that might be missing or suggest an additional useful resources for the course. It might be an article, a pdf or even a video. The key here is to think something very useful for the purposes of the course and the students. The content will have to be published on your blog in order to not look as a commercial resource and then you will kindly ask them to link it in their resource section.
– Find a broken link and replace it
Use any tool like Xenu in order to find broken links in the page, mainly from the section above or on any other section with articles and publications. If you find any broken link offer them to replace it with something similar that comes from your website. If your website doesn’t have such a content to replace the broken one then start writing something quality and useful and ask them to replace it with yours.
– Propose a Guest Blog or Publication
Look if there is a blog in the course’s website, or if it doesn’t, most probably there will be a section for publications or other useful articles. Find a nice and quality idea that can become a great article for the students to read and propose it to get published on the course website. This can be hard but not impossible if you manage to think of a topic that will provide great value to the students
– Offer a guest lecture
That is actually something I did in the past (UCY lecture for Search Engines) and it was not as hard as you might think. Check the notes of the course and find a topic that you believe a presentation will make it even more understandable to the students. An industry expert will provide an additional great value in the topic, in combination with the professor. If this link worth an hour to you and the university is not that far from your area then go for it. You will have to suggest a live presentation to the students that will provide experienced knowledge and quality market tips for the students. This is something that most probably both the students and the professor of the course will find very interesting. When your presentation is done, suggest your slides to be published on the courses section with a link to your website.
– Give an award for the best student
That’s a little common and might cost more money but it will offer much more than a link to your website anyway. You can provide a price award or a sponsorship or a gift to the best student of the course. Or develop a completion with an award to the students. Such type of event can be easily published on the course’s website with a link to your website.
– Provide content to the community and Link Bait
A lot of courses or departments maintain boards or forums. It’s not easy to log in there and participate but you can use an inbound approach to make students link to you. If part of the board is public then you can get some idea of what students ask or seek for the needs of the course. You can provide useful content on your website that can cover some of these needs and then using social media and other resources, will lead students to link on your site within these forums and boards. This is a great approach as it might also generate links to you by other universities.
Nobody said getting a link from a university is easy but it depends how much you need it and if it worth it. If your industry fits on the above tips then go for it, you won’t lose anything trying. But you have to keep in mind that universities are not blogs or “link givers”. You will need to find some really great value content or activity to do in order to gain a link from them.
Author Bio: Pantelis Vladimirou is the co-founder of Webarts Ltd, a creative Digital Agency offering Cyprus SEO services, Web Design, Social Media and other wide Internet Marketing services in Cyprus
