EDU Link Building: The Strongest Link in the SEO Chain!

Here at Walnut Solutions, we provide the best online marketing solutions to businesses of all shapes and sizes. We know of every possible way to place your business on the surest path to prosperity. As you may have already realized, one of our specialty services is link building for websites. We swear by White Hat practices and our team of SEO experts will find all possible ways to link your scholarship related content and educational service offers to recognized .edu websites. Search engines will take a delight in going through your sitemap without any hurdle. And you will find your business website at the top of every relevant SRL without much ado. This is all due to our extensive back-link building program that works as the ultimate popularity check for your website.

Link building – the fine art of SEO

The late 1990s saw the development of search engine algorithms that could analyze website popularity based on link data. The quality of links determines the quality of your own website, the reliability quotient of your content and the popularity of your website. Links are the litmus test of your website’s authority, trust and reliability since most trusted sites seek out other trusted websites for building links.

Assigning Value to Links

Ever since the primary conception of backlinks-based ranking in the late ‘90s, search engines have developed their own methods (algorithms) for assigning value to these links. At the moment, most SEO experts cannot clearly understand the metrics appointed by search engines to assign value to these links. But years of experience in working the fields of edu link building has given Walnut Solutions the ability to safely list down a few factors that you will need to consider before building backlinks to website content. i. How is the link neighborhood? Spam works both ways. Search engines have had the time to observe and take into account that spam websites usually link to other spammy websites. This is one reason why you need to understand the neighborhood your own website will be linking to. ii. TrustRank This is one way search engines ensure that your website content is reliable and trustworthy. It is estimated that, about 60% of all website content is spam. Your website simply needs to earn links from highly trusted websites and domains like .gov or .edu in order to earn the trust of search engines. iii. Anchor text Anchor texts are the strongest signals used for ranking. This concept is pretty simple – if a number of links point to one page with all the right keywords then that page has a very high chance of ranking well for the targeted keywords or “anchor text”. iv. Net popularity Popularity has two nuances – global and local. These respectively refer to links from websites that are popular on a global scale and local scale, respectively. A good example of the first kind is Wikipedia. This “online encyclopedia” is linked to millions of websites and this makes it globally significant and well-trusted, even though it is open-source.

How to get these .edu sites to notice you?

They are the celebrities of websites that provide reliable backlinks. Till date, the best proven way to get their attention is to offer them something of value. For example – if you are looking towards getting your content linked to a University website, you may want to offer students some kind of a scholarship for studying there. Now, this scholarship can be extremely generic or industry-specific, but the moment you mention a scholarship, it grabs the attention of the .edu websites owners.

How can you find the .edu Listing Websites That Are Up For Backlinking?

You can try some of the tried and tested search strings when searching for pages of scholarship listing:

• site:.edu "scholarships"
• site:.edu "college scholarships"
• site:.edu "scholarship list"
• site:.edu "list of scholarships"
• site:.edu "scholarship links"
• site:.edu "keyword + scholarships"
• site:.edu "private scholarships"
• site:.edu "subject name + scholarships"
• site:.edu "outside agency scholarships"

Once you try using these search strings on Google, you will be presented with quite a few options that match your query. Check the Page Rank before stepping towards making a commitment. A page with PR5 or PR 6 should be good enough for a new scholarship program. But getting a PR 5 page to approve your link to their website can be quite challenging. Here, if you use the name of a specific University for building the edu scholarship link building, it increases your odds of getting your link approved significantly. But make sure, your scholarship program looks reliable and trustworthy.

Link building for University alumni

This link building business can be especially easy for you if you are a University alumnus. You can easily link your website to the news section of the alumni category of the University bearing the .edu link. If you want to find out if your alma mater supports this kind of alumni-based link building, you can check the following search strings:

• site:yourschool.edu "alumni profiles"
• site:yourschool.edu "alum profile"
• site:yourschool.edu "alum record"

Linking You Content to the Pro-Blogger’s Dens

You can also increase the trust-quotient of your own content by linking it to the .edu and .gov blogs. While .gov blogs are a rare treat, getting through to .edu blogs is like crossing the Bermuda Triangle. Acquiring a non-blog comment is impossible unless of course you find the most subtle, yet effective way to stroke their ego. We can easily achieve this for you by employing a Best Blogger Awards and/or some kind of a themed-blogging competition targeted at these .edu domains. Quite like the previous cases, it is easy enough to find blogs on this domain using the following search strings:

• site:.edu "keyword" "blog post"
• site:.edu "keyword" "post comment"
• site:.edu "keyword" "staff blogs"
• site:.edu "keyword" "student blogs"
• site:.edu inurl:blog

Finding the Sweet Deals: Resource Page Links

There’s one more effective way of linking your content to .edu sites – linking to content on resource pages. This is one of the most popular ways to skyrocketing the reliability and ranks of websites that have related content. This is a very rewarding process since resource pages of websites exist for this very purpose. Now, the trick is to find resource pages that aren’t as crowded and that have a high Page Rank with Google search engine algorithms. You can try the following search strings for finding effective resource pages:

• site:.edu keyword + inurl:resources
• site:.edu keyword + inurl:links

Always remember to conduct your searches using the strings exactly as mentioned here. For example, if you have a website that specializes in online tuition for SAT and GRE, you may want to begin with broad topics like “preparing for SAT” and “GRE preparation guidance” before going into more specific searches. This will primarily ensure that you have an astronomical number of target resource pages to begin with.

Why Do You Need a Supportive SEO Team to Verify the Backlinking Process? All about Discount Deals on .Edu Link Building

Most universities are known to offer discounts for faculty and students on their websites. You might be a former student of ABC University, but you may not know of ongoing deals and discounts for link building. Now, Walnut Solutions can help you utilize these discounts and help you in the link building process without being a burden on your finances. Discount edu link building is not a myth and a having a good SEO team will help you realize that in your next link building endeavor. First foremost, we will help you find the listed discounts with active links:

• site:.edu "staff discounts"
• site:.edu "student discounts"
• site:.edu "employee discount program"

But that is not the end of this story; our team will also analyze the page rank of each and every hit and then check out the followed links on each page. We will also fill out the discount forms and other paperwork for you. In other words, all the legwork for getting this discounted .edu link can be done by Walnut Solutions while you reap the benefits of the high quality backlinks. Linking to universities can be easier if you run local brick-and-mortar business. These can be stationary shops, restaurants, cafes and bookstores that cater exclusively to students of a particular University. It really helps if your establishment is either within the extended campus area of the University or adjacent to the premises. In order to find which University is closest to you and which ones will be possibly interested to approve your links, use the following search strings:

• site:school.edu "admissions"
• site:school.edu "accommodation"
• site:school.edu "local restaurants"
• site:school.edu inurl:visiting
• site:yourschool.com inurl:visiting your school

Again, searching on Google using these search strings is child’s play. Any content writer can do this without having any working knowledge of SEO. But when working with a leading SEO consultancy firm such as Walnut Solutions, you can enjoy the complete package of local resource listings, and possible sections/categories that can be linked to your industry. If the section has a room for your industry, we will contact the University and suggest that they add your name/business to that list. Some schools make it even easier for local business. They have created separate pages to highlight local business for their faculty, students and parents. We have the potential to look for these pages and find the live links to local businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions about Link Building and SEO

1.What are the basic strategies for reliable link building? Search engines know that sites with .edu have trust, age and domain authority that should be venerated by all link builders. The trick is landing these links. Since almost everyone knows that .edu links have a special power over search engines that cause sites backlinking to .edu sites to skyrocket to the top of every SRL, you can find it especially challenging to back-link your content to these sites. 2.What do you need to begin a scholarship link building program? You may want to try the following checklist for making sure of that: a. Include an award amount b. Mention the number of winners clearly c. Include a PDF version or a direct online application for the scholarship applicants d. Mention the deadline clearly (specify time too, for example – 29 December 2017, mid-night) e. Do not forget to include the requirements in the application form (for example – the essays, sops and specific major) 3.What are the best ways to attract .edu bloggers? You need to find the bloggers on .edu platforms that are active, have clear contact info and follow out-bound links. Then you need to design a competition based on defined factors that will reach out to .edu bloggers. 4.Is it possible to get .edu links if you are not an educational website? Your business can be a hotel frequented by University guests, parents of the students or the students themselves. In all these cases, getting .edu links approved from the University website becomes a walk in the park with a few clauses. 5.What are the most basic ways to get good quality backlinks to blogs? Writing quality articles with regular submission to web directories is one way to ensure that your blogs get good quality backlinks. 6.Is buying .edu links a White Hat SEO practice? Both Google and Bing put in a lot of time and effort to discount to influence of bought/paid links. Although it is impossible to detect all the paid links, paying for backlinks is not really an advisable White Hat SEO strategy. However, certain agencies deliver results when you buy edu backlinks from them. 7.Is linking synonymous to social sharing? Irrespective of what some en vogue SEO articles may try to tell you, link building and social sharing are not the same. Social shares including those on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ affects ranking magnificently; links are far more influential as far as your website content is considered. 8."I have old links to .edu sites but my website rank is falling by the day, why?" This is one question we face very often. There’s something called FreshRank that search engines like Google use to detect the freshness of links. Stale links have very little influence on website ranking. A link building campaign is an exhaustive process. Simply moving forward with your own link building process is not enough to boost your website’s ranks. You need to keep an eye on your competitors’ backlinks as well. This is rather tricky if you do not have an astute knowledge of SEO and ranking algorithms that use several parameters to judge backlinks. If you are interested to work on your backlinking and website rank status, give us a call anytime!