Link building is branding.
More than just another technique to rank a website on search these days, link building should be perceived as a robust tool to stand out and build your brand in your industry.
That’s why getting links from relevant authoritative websites is critical these days. By getting mentions and links on topical content, you gain signals that search engines use to trust your website more.
Through that, you achieve the primary benefits of ranking for more industry keywords and earn natural backlinks from respectable publications in your niche.
One of the authoritative websites you should be aiming to get backlinks from is educational institutions — from colleges and universities.
Edu backlinks have more trust signals than other types of websites from the eyes of search engines. As such, the more edu backlinks you acquire for your website, the more likely you increase authority to your online brand.
So, here are some tips to help you get edu backlinks and boost your site’s important pages.
1. Collaborate with educators for content.
One of the clever ways to get your content noticed in today’s marketing game is to publish web assets with the high utility of information.
These are content assets that are not quickly produced by anyone, as it requires a certain kind of expertise and expertise to flesh out ideas and topics based on credible data sources. So it’s important to partner with an SEO company that provides link building services to clients.
One way to help you create content that will earn attention from university websites is by collaborating with educators.
Given that they’re into the academic sector, they know what topics would resonate with the audience, in this case — students, teachers, and parents.
You can contact these people by checking if any available educators regularly publish content outside their university scope.
Reach out to them and ask if they’ll be willing to collaborate with your brand to produce an interesting piece on a subject. The subject includes topics of your blog and/or educational materials these academic experts have built over the past years.
Make sure that’s a win-win situation. Your brand creates a comprehensive content asset on a given topic while the educator gets their desired exposure (outside the academe sector).
You may also offer other incentives, such as free access to any of your products or services. But, again, this one is an added value proposition: they’re likely to appreciate working with your content team.
2. Create guides that appeal to educators.
Educators know which type of content resonates with their audience.
Web admins of university sites have only one goal — to keep their pages worthy of consumption by their target audience.
And if you can provide a resource that’s worth noticing and worth referencing by educators, you’ve got many opportunities available to you.
Start by discovering topics in need by educators. For example, it could be a guide about simplified styles to teaching certain subjects, frameworks, and formats about education, and ways and tips to keep students engaged in a classroom or online room set up.
By creating such types of content assets, you increase the perceived linkability of your pages. Thus, it would be easier for you to acquire high-quality backlinks from respective colleges and university sites.
3. Offer targeted scholarship programs.
Besides proper education, universities and colleges want to aid their students and potential candidates with their financial needs.
As such, you’ll see different types of programs to give these youth a chance to study courses they’d want to pursue.
One way to help these people is by offering scholarship programs.
Several edu backlink opportunities await for brands that can offer scholarship programs to specific groups of students.
While many SEOs are wary about scholarship backlinks, I still believe in its value — only when you target the right niche for the program.
For example, if you are a legal firm, it is best to offer a scholarship program related to your brand. In this case, it would be a financial aid program for law school students.
Targeting scholarship pages that list down different scholarship program links from different industries (unrelated to each other) diminishes the value of each backlink from a relevance standpoint.
What you want to do is to get edu backlinks from relevant scholarship pages (legal scholarship listing pages to your legal financial aid program). This way, you give more signals for search engines to understand what your website is about (topical relevance) and add more credibility to you as an online business (authority).
4. Give discounts to students.
Besides financial aid programs like scholarships, you can also try to give students discounts on products or services you offer as a business.
Depending on your price range and resources, you can offer discounts so irresistible not to be listed on the universities’ student discount pages.
Offering student product discounts is a quick way to generate edu backlinks to your website, as you don’t have to push out content on your blog.
All you have to do is to create a page dedicated to the discount program.
Then, prospect for available discount listing pages on universities. Using search queries with an advanced search operator (inurl:.edu “student discount”).
Then once you collect university pages and make them part of your list of link prospects, you can reverse engineer other brands that also offer discount codes for universities.
5. Publish academic work for library guides.
Content matters if you want to gain new edu backlinks for your websites.
Content that’s more likely to attract high-quality links is the ones with academic information on it.
You see, most universities have online library guides where they list down all references and resources on various subjects.
Look for available library guides from universities by using the search phrase, “site:.edu “libguide” “topic”.
Once you’ve found some libguides pages from university sites, you’ll figure out what content ideas they link out to.
From here, you start your outlining of content to match it to topics this libguides reference the most.
As you publish your content and start promoting it to university sites, you may want to discover more libguides from competing content assets on libguides list.
The good thing is that you’ll be able to source out for other types of pages that may potentially link to your content asset. One example is resource pages.
You typically find these resource pages from publications, organizations’ sites, and bloggers where they simply have a list of useful resources on a given topic.
6. Reach out to student bloggers.
One of the best ways to get more high-quality backlinks for your website is through content collaboration.
By having a solid partnership for content, you get a higher perceived value on your work.
And for university websites, you can collaborate with students who’ve been writing for online columns or blog sections of their respective universities.
Some of them may be looking for part-time freelance work — that your brand can provide for them, or at least researching new resources on editorial topics — that your content team can provide them with links to published content on your site.
Look out for these student bloggers. Reach out to them and offer content partnership or pay per content work — as a means to provide incentives to these student writers.
Strategize For Better Edu Backlinks
Edu backlinks from reputable and trusted websites, i.e., colleges and university websites, aren’t easy to replicate.
However, with due diligence in backlink discovery, content creation, and outreach activities, you get higher chances of more quality and quantity of edu links.
