So what is an ambitious Search Marketer to do?

Do your research. Look at the edu’s that have linked to your competition and find out why. Depending on your industry, there could be a variety of reasons why a school, professor, or student may link to your competition and if they link to your competition then they likely will be open to linking to your site.

Job Postings. Most every school has a place for job postings somewhere on their site. My attitude is that every business that has employees is always hiring, or at least reviewing resume’s. So, get busy on Google and start searching using a query like inurl:.edu “job postings” and you will see thousands of school job posting pages ripe for the picking. And who knows, maybe you can get a hot intern out of it.

Open Your Wallet. If theres anything that both schools and students love and need, its money. If you or your client belong to a relatively large company, then you can probably afford to contribute something to some department or organization affiliated with a school. Start with a local school and find out what they need. Not only will you likely get a link from the .edu, but you will likely get some additional publicity out of it. If not, you can always crank out your own press releases praising your altruism.

Well, that’s 3 ideas that should be good for some .edu’s to any site that is actually worth linking to. Good hunting!