You’ll see many websites highlighting the power of back links from websites with .edu and .gov TLDs. These are the TLDs for US tertiary education providers and government departments or organisations, on both a federal and state level. If your website has a relationship to the US market, and there’s a feasible way to connect up with a website that’s in possession of a .edu or .gov TLD, great! Perhaps you run a business that provides video-call tutoring to students anywhere in the world — there’s definitely scope to connect with folks running .edu domains.
But if your market is a little closer to home, don’t immediately discount the potential of government and education connections. There’s still authority in .govt.nz and .ac.nz TLDs. It may be on a smaller scale than the US equivalents … but so too is the New Zealand market.
If you can connect in with a relevant department — whether a government one or something at a tertiary provider — you can get some of that great domain authority flowing on to your own website and up your ranking in the process. As for the how of that connection, there are plenty of ways. Maybe you can sponsor an award for a relevant faculty, or publish some really excellent content that relates well to a ministry’s current cause célèbre, meaning they could link through to it in a round-up of ‘useful resources’.
Get creative — it’s worth the time and effort, not only for the SEO benefits, but the building of real-life, offline relationships, too! As much as we’re focusing on SEO, only a fool would discount the power of word-of-mouth recommendation and support.
If you want to control the context of the links to your website, there’s one very straightforward way to do that — share your expertise around. If you’ve got a connection with a company in a related field, offer to write a pro bono guest blog post. It’s extra content for them, free of charge — and for you, it’s the chance to share useful information on your own terms, with name recognition and a link back to your website. Everybody wins!
Want an easy option? Creating a pertinent ‘how to’ guide is always popular on a business blog, regardless of its focus — just make sure it relates to the intended audience. It could be how to pack for a snowboarding trip on a ski tourism website, or how to unclog a toilet on a plumbing website, or how to make sure your socks last for as long as possible on our old friend SEO Leeds website.
You can make things even more straightforward, and offer to write a piece on the problem you had that this other company solved, why you chose them, and where to next. It’s praise for the company in question while also sharing your own story.