When you’re working on a link building campaign, there are two approaches you can take: creating original content for your site that people will want to link to or reaching out to other relevant websites to request a link. Generally, the latter practice has been falling out of style due to its difficulty. If you want to pursue this method, you’ll need to make your efforts worthwhile by getting links from high-ranking, authoritative sites. Depending on your business and location, links from college and university websites can yield excellent results.

In search results, academic websites receive high-rankings either by virtue of their sponsored top-level .edu domain (Google and Bing have not confirmed whether top-level domain type contributes to a site’s ranking in search, but some SEO professionals believe it does), and/or because they have a robust profile of back-links. Why so many back links? Because, .edu sites are large and full of authoritative content – which naturally attracts lots of links from other sites. As such, links from .edu sites have a lot of value.

Even though your website may have nothing to do with academia, links from .edu domains can be beneficial for your link building. On top of that, there are many avenues of approach you take when requesting a link:

The Local Approach: .edu sites often provide users with links to nearby businesses. This helps the site show prospective and current students all available off-campus resources while drumming up some sales for local retailers or service providers. Contact your local schools or universities to see if your business can be included in such listings.

The Career Approach: If your company is hiring, inform the career services office at universities that specialize in your field. By maintaining a career page on your website, you can ensure that career services offices link back to it.

Along similar lines, you can also contact your alma mater about your own personal career success. The alumni organizations and academic departments may be delighted to showcase your success and link back to your company site.

The Research Approach: As academic institutions, most colleges and universities maintain an active library staff. As gurus of information, University librarians consistently produce research guides for online audiences on nearly every topic imaginable. Are they writing about you? Try an “inurl” command search in Google using “libguide” or “libraryguide” and a keyword related to your business. Here’s an example for “real estate.”

As you can see, university libraries across the nation are covering it. Find some guides where you think a link back to your website would be relevant, and then reach out to the library or author of the guide.

As you can see, links from .edu sites not only provide link building value, but are rife with multiple opportunities for many types of companies. Going after .edu links might be just the boost your link building program needs!

Guest blogging is a great way to get quality inbound links to your site. And inbound links, we all know, are a cornerstone of SEO. But, like many ways to market your brand online, there are good ways and bad ways to go about it. Here, we’ll look at some of the Dos and Don’ts of guest blogging.

Do – Use your expertise in a way that can grow your audience – and your influence.

This is the main reason behind guest blogging.

There are blogs that do not directly compete with your business but that relate to your business in some way. If you sell shoes, for example, you might want to look into creating quality content for wedding blogs, fashion blogs or, depending on what kind of shoes you sell, blogs aimed at parents, gardeners, environmentalists, etc.

Don’t – Contact blogs that have nothing to do with your business.

The purpose of guest blogging is to find your audience – or potential audiences – where they live. The key word here is synergy. Creating posts for blogs that have no synergistic connection to your business is a waste of time for all involved.

Do – Create quality content.

The content that you create for each blog should be unique, and should depend upon the look and feel of the blog you’re writing for. If you want to produce content for a blog that tends to be photo-heavy, for example, you will need to produce photos that illustrate your blog post.

Don’t – Pepper your guest blog post with unnecessary links.

Guest blogging is all about cultivating relationships, not building link farms. Link once or twice to extremely pertinent information on your own site, and leave it at that.

Do – Find your audience where it lives.

Use a demographic tool like Google’s Double Click Ad Planner to determine what kind of audience a blog attracts.

Don’t – Waste your time.

Don’t waste your time producing blog posts for blogs with little traffic. Evaluate a blog’s traffic with Double Click Ad Planner to make sure a blog is worth your time.

Do – Write your blog posts ahead of time.

When you approach a publisher with a complete package, rather than an idea, you make it much more likely that the blogger will accept your content.

Don’t – Be impersonal.

Think of guest blogging as relationship building. Don’t send out mass email blasts, or the same content to more than one publisher. Your goal is to make friends. So be human and put your best face forward.

Google’s Penguin update back in April caused a scramble in the SEO world as everyone reevaluated the tools and channels that they use to build ranking in the SERPs. Since Penguin primarily targeted SEO spam tactics and shady link portfolios, link building methods came under particular scrutiny.

For the most part, none of the rules had really changed. Compelling content on authoritative websites with relevant links back to your site is still considered good link building. However, website authority was being questioned more rigorously. There is also an unwritten rule of SEO: links that you must work harder to build are more valuable (which is why quality link building programs often turn into full-time jobs for some companies). With those two ideas, critical eyes turned on Squidoo.

Squidoo is a quasi-popular content site. Although it doesn’t get the same level of buzz as Tumblr or Facebook, it does get millions of hits and its articles (called “lenses” on the site) can rank highly in search results. Squidoo allows users to create content-rich multimedia pages on virtually any subject. Ordinarily, this makes it a great channel for building links. However, there is no barrier to entry – anyone can make a Squidoo account and start posting content. In light of the Penguin update, SEO experts speculated that Squidoo was a gaggle of spammers reposting or repurposing scraped content to score some links. In other words, Squidoo had no authority and was a quick way to get some easy links – low-value SEO in every way. Since many websites that were penalized by Penguin had Squidoo links in their portfolio, it was a compelling argument. But is that really the case?

Links and lenses are only granted visibility on the site for a limited time. After a lens goes live, Squidoo may soon change it into a “Work-In-Progress (WIP) lens. Lenses are given a WIP status when they lack visitors or haven’t been updated with new content after a period of time. Although the URL for the lens is still valid and users can reach the page via a direct link, WIP lenses don’t appear in Squidoo search results or outside search engines. In other words, once a lens becomes WIP, all of its link value is lost.

Currently, there’s no way to tell to what degree Penguin has devalued links from Squidoo. However, with the frequency Squidoo assigns WIP status, it’s doubtful that links from the site have any negative impact since they only come from active lenses. From a link building perspective, WIP lenses are a double edge sword. On one hand, would be spammers aren’t able to derive much benefit. On the other hand, real link builders might get more work than they bargained for. Building a successful lens requires a combination of design aesthetic, compelling copy and an interesting theme. Keeping that great lens from becoming WIP requires fresh content and updates, plus promotion on blogs and social media to keep visitors coming.

Then again, good link building is supposed to be challenging. Squidoo or otherwise, if you create original content through a variety of channels, your link building efforts will be successful.