31 March 2010 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Building links from universities naturally

It's widely believed among search marketers that links from educational resources such as universities (.edu) and colleges (.ac.uk) can significantly influence your rankings.

While link building for a client, bigmouthmedia was inadvertently provided with documentation describing a list of requirements that scholars must obey when linking to (or citing) electronic documents such as webpages.

Here's how our conversation went:

Bigmouth: "Hey, I think this website would be a good resource for your research on apples."
Scholar: "I agree; thanks for the tip. Can you provide me with a last modified date?"
Bigmouth: "Why do you need a last modified date?"
Scholar: "Before linking or citing websites, we need to provide a last modified date, amongst other criteria, so people can match the date of viewing to the citation to look for changes etc."

The scholar then provided bigmouthmedia with a link to documents that describe the legal requirements when citing an electronic document. These documents suggest users provide the following details for each citation:

Author Surname, Initial. - provide the surname and first initial for the publisher. Would definitely consider having a contact us or team page on a website or article.

(Year) Title [online]. - provide a year and title for the publication. Ensure you have your H1 tag effectively shown and marked up to influence this.

Place of publication, Publisher. - physical location associated with resource and publisher's name. Wouldn't worry about location but would strongly consider adding names to articles and information content and research.

Available from: URL[Last Modified Date]. - the website's URL and last modified date. Would consider creating a permalink for webpages and adding a last modified date at the end of an article or in the footer of the webpage.

The end result should look like the following:

Thomson, M. (2010) Building links from universities naturally [online]. Edinburgh, Bigmouthmedia.
Available from: http://www.bigmouthmedia.com / live / articles / building-links-from-universities-naturally.asp / 6866 /
[Last Modified 31st March 2010].

You may assume this procedure is only required for research citations or publications, but think again. Have you ever noticed that nearly all webpages by university scholars have a last modified date in the footer? If you query Google for "last updated" "inurl:.edu" expect to find a vast array of webpages returned (12,000,000: not bad).

College, university and government websites make up a healthy proportion of the web; the lesson learned here is that with a handful of simple alterations that should come as common sense, you can influence how well your link building and digital marketing campaign goes. Bigmouthmedia will certainly consider adding a last modified dates to certain content - will you?

Home | Careers | RSS | Contact Us | Newsletter

International sites: