Outside of the Box

Reach out to bloggers. This is a great tactic in itself, but realise that there are a lot of academic blogs hosted on university sites. Follow/read them, and decide how they can help your business.

  1. 1. Offer a student / staff discount, then ask to be mentioned on their website.
  2. 2. Give the university some good press – they all have press departments looking to showcase good things people are saying about this
  3. 3. Participate in a scheme – eg industrial placement / sandwich schemes where they provide an intern / graduate. These were then featured as a case study on their site. So you get business benefit as well as link benefit from this
  4. 4. Sponsor a student event (it’ll cost peanuts to do) – get a link back
  5. 5. Deliver a careers talk – it’s hard to get a job as a graduate, so they love guest speakers from every sector. As well as the obvious benefits to your business of attracting graduates, you can also get links from their careers site and events calendars
  6. 6. Advertise a job via their careers service – get a link back to your site – again this clearly has a business benefit
  7. 7. Become a case study for their business department – eg MBA courses and business studies degrees can analyse the company -> links
  8. 8. Get boycotted! A little bit of bad publicity doesn’t hurt much.
  9. 9. Consider launching a community website – government sites tend to link to these – eg local organisations – secondary link juice this way
  10. 10. Set up a charitable website – it’s much easier to get links without commercial content
  11. 11. Some government sites do have business directories! They have the highest editorial standards of any directories I’ve ever seen, but they are out there!
  12. 12. Put on an event – the more local the better, again one of the few commercial sites a government site will link to
  13. 13. Start a campaign (it helps if the council agrees with the cause)
  14. 14. Job websites are one of the few types of purely commercial sites that government websites will link to
  15. 15. Run For Parliament (LOL) – this could be an outrageous PR stunt, many authority sites including government ones will link to

Don’t just look at the backlinks to the homepage or entire site – look at backlinks to individual inner pages – this is a great way to find golden links to competitors.