Education Links - “DoFollow” Tuesdays
Filed Under: Do Follow Tuesdays, Education
Every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Education market. We invite all of you out there to post (in the comments) a specific link building recommendation for the education market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “dofollow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed.
So you might be thinking "why in the world do schools need to work at getting inbound links? Heck, I am trying to get links from .edu’s!" Let me assure you there are many educational institutions out there conduction link building all the time. Admittedly, most of them are for profit or career colleges, but we know of many traditional schools building links to specific pages such as MBA and continuing education programs.
A word of caution: the affiliate business in the education market is huge. Many education affiliate sites are very well done, have high PR and are pretty well established. However, if you look hard enough, you can get direct links from those sites as they do need a number of outbound links that are not affiliate links. With that said, here are some sites that link directly to educational institutions, they are PR3 to PR7 sites. All of them were found by checking the Google backlinks of just two schools - one career college and one public school. Image what a thorough search would provide.
At Campus Explorer, it is not obvious how to get your school listed here, but you should make the effort. This site has over 3,500 Google backlinks to the home page. Each school detail page has a direct link to the school along with a detailed description. We suggest you use the contact us form at the bottom of the page.
Students Review has a couple ways for you to participate. The obvious one is for students to review your school, but they also offer a forum which seems to be a bit unmoderated (if you know what I mean).
Peterson’s is a PR7 site and will take a little work for you to get listed. They have many affiliate links but there are plenty of pages that have direct links to schools. Most affiliate sites do need non-affiliate outbound links to help with their rankings. Try the contact us at the bottom of the page.
College Tool Kit is pretty interesting. Lots of great info and a PR7. Looks like you will also need to use the contact form at the bottom page.
Edu Registry is an affiliate site, but has a nice list of schools by state. Looks like you need to use the email address at the bottom of their page to contact them.
RateMyProfessors is a bit of a social site and it is pretty obvious what needs to be done here to get a link (or many links). Reach out to some of your students and go for it!
US School Directory is a pretty straight forward site listing schools by state. Looks like you need to use their contact form to request a listing and they may require a reciprocal link.
OK - there are 7 really nice opportunities for links TO education sites. Now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice for link building for the education market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "dofollow" link from us.
Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market.
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Technorati Tags: education links, career colleges, schools, edu links, students review, school directory, vertical markets, education niche, education market, link building
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- From News About Tech from all around the world » SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 24, 2008 | Jun 24, 2008
Chris | Jun 25, 2008 | Reply
As SEO enters the classroom, there are many professors having their students use, operate, and manage many web tools we use every day (after all, its the best way to learn). As a recent college grad, I sought out other online marketing related classes in open conversation; particularly, social networks and for this example, blogs.
The blog UPEI - BUS442.0 is a blog run by a college professor on Prince Edward Island. He uses the blog for exercises and requires his students to create posts. Linking to this blog, students were even more engaged in mine because they were getting response and feedback from another college student.
I’m not sure if this counts as a linking strategy, but professors teaching internet based marketing are only going to be growing.
Chuck Grant | Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
We are a company in the education space (our website provides math homework help). We sell to both schools and parents.
We want the schools to do the best job possible getting the word out to students about our website, so we go all out in that direction:
a) We show them how to link to our site from their web pages.
b) We have a file they can print to hand out to parents describing our service.
c) We have a brief video on our Educators page summarizing our service.
d) We have a 10-step program for teachers telling them how to best integrate our service into their program
e) We send teachers a monthly e-letter with the acutal usage of our service by their students.
And still, we see great variation in the usage from school to school, and it is our ongoing mission to refine this further.
PS If your teenaged kid could use some help with their math, please check us out!
Rebecca Haden | Jul 8, 2008 | Reply
Don’t miss the education blogs — there are plenty out there! You can start at mine (http://www.xanga.com/dextr) and follow the webrings to get started.
Also submit your site to teachersourcebook.com. They check your site out pretty throughly, but if you are a valuable resource for educators, you can have a free listing online and in print, and we’ve found that the traffic from it is good.
Beauty Schools | Jul 11, 2008 | Reply
Hello,
I link build for several career education and education directory websites and I’ll briefly go over some of the strategies I utilize.
Sorry if these are fairly obvious:
1: Analyze competitor websites: This is a great way to find high schools, library, and education sites that are already linking to sites like yours.
2. Making phone calls: When I come across library links, especially, I like talking to the librarians about possibly adding our sites as resources. This, many times, can increase your conversion rates.
3.Follow up: I have found a lot of success doing follow up emails to webmasters, librarians, counselors etc. It is just a good reminder for these busy professionals.
4.Thank you: Always be polite and courteous. If they add your link be quick in thanking them. Who knows, maybe you’ll get another link in the future from them.
5. (site:*.k12.*.us inurl:guidance) This is a good way to find guidance pages on high schools websites. Many times education professionals will be looking for education resources. Try different variations of this search query.
Hoped some of these tips helped. Thanks.
Vertical Measures | Jul 11, 2008 | Reply
@Beauty - Happy to give you the text link - excellent advice (for all vertical markets)!
Rebecca Haden | Jul 22, 2008 | Reply
@ Beauty — I wouldn’t have thought of the guidance pages idea — not obvious at all! Thanks for sharing.