The theory is that Google assigns a lot of authority to websites of colleges and other educational institutions. I don’t think there is any question of whether a link from an authority site is better than a link from a non-authority site. If I had my choice of one link from authority site or  10 links from various non-authority sites I would take the one link any time.

Considering the above statements and speculations the question boils down to whether educational domain sites really carry more authority than other sites. Just like in other areas of life there are very few absolutes in search engine optimization. My opinion is that EDU links on average are actually superior to other links.

There will be some people who will disagree with me primarily because of a statement that one of the Google employees made in early 2008. John Mueller, a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, stated:

“In general, I would like to add that no, backlinks from .EDU domains generally do not get ‘additional credibility from Google.’”

I don’t really know if that statement as expressed by John is entirely accurate, but even if it is it still does not dissuade me from pursuing EDU links. Even if Google does not explicitly ascribe more value to EDU links that does not mean that on average EDU links are not more valuable than other links.

I base a lot of my SEO knowledge on my own experimentation and testing. Obviously, I read what the experts say, and take that into consideration. However, I very rarely take those statements as fact unless I have experienced them with my own sites.

I devised a simple test to compare the authority of EDU sites to other sites in general. While it is in no way a scientific test or proof that all EDU sites carry more authority than other sites, it does make it pretty clear that EDU domains are usually authority sites. Here is what I did and you can feel free to try this at home:

I made a list of 10 college sites, 10 corporate sites, and 10.net sites. I tried to balance each list with a mixture of large medium and small organizations. I then visited each site and checked the Google page rank. Obviously page rank is not the only indicator of a sites authority but it is a pretty good one regardless.

What I found was that the small colleges had page ranks of five or six, the midsized colleges six or seven, and the large colleges eight or nine. The.COM and NET sites had about two less page rank than the corresponding EDU sites.

I still wouldn’t stand on my head to get EDU links, but if I had a fairly easy way to get those links I would go for it. Well, it just so happens that I do know a fairly easy (and free) method of getting EDU links. On the other hand it is actually harder to get links from high page rank corporate and network sites.

If you register for my free newsletter you will get a report that explains in detail how to get free EDU links. This report usually sells for $27, but I have obtained the rights to provide it for free to my subscribers. Please note if you already subscribe to my newsletter you either already have this free report or receive it shortly there is no need to subscribe again.

The video is 46 minutes long, but definitely worth spending the time to view. In fact, I watched it twice, and may even watch it a third time. Matt is pretty fast and packs a lot of information into the video. I have been doing search engine optimization for a long time and I still learned a number of new things from this video.

For example — I had no idea that there was a tag Google recognizes to define the content of your page for Adsense. If you put the following tags around the meat of your posts Google will use only that section to determine what ads are shown on the page:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

There are tons of other tips, hints, and insights into the workings of Google. Please take the time to watch the video. You will be glad that you did.

You can check out Matt’s blog to see all his slides from the presentation.

You also probably know that links to your pages are important to get good search engine rankings. That part of search engine optimization (SEO) is often called link building SEO. Having good keywords is just as important for link building SEO as it is for the content of your pages.

How do you get good keywords? It all starts in your head. Do a little brainstorming and come up with a “starter keyword” that is general and coveys what your site is (or will be) about. As an example let’s take the keyword lamps as our starter keyword for our link building SEO project.

If you read my newsletter you may already know that lamps is a great keyword, but it is very tough to rank for it because there is too much competition. We need some less generic keywords.

We are going to use same free tools to get a list of keywords to work with.

Visit the following link to get started:

WordTracker free keyword suggestion tool

Enter the word lamps in the keyword field and click the “hit me” button. You will get a list of related keywords and an estimated number of searches per day for those keywords. If you click on any of the listed keywords the tool does a new search with that keyword as the starting point.

If you were doing this keyword research for your link building SEO campaign you would want to copy and paste the data into a spreadsheet or text file so you can keep track of it.

I like the WordTracker tool because it is very fast and simple to use. You can also use the following tool to do the same thing and even get more data:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

As you use the Google tool you will notice that the search volume numbers are monthly and typically much higher than the WordTracker estimates. Google’s numbers are from their own search data and are probably more accurate.

There is a lot of data you can get from the Google tool including some estimate of the amount of competition from the green bar graphic for each keyword. In another blog post I talked about a more accurate way to measure keyword competition.

There is one more free tool for your link building SEO keyword research I want to introduce:

MSN Commercial Intention Checker

It defaults to URL input but you will want to select the query mode and enter a potential keyword. It will give you either a commercial intention number or a non-commercial intent number. on their scale 1=100%. If your site is selling something this is a very important thing to know.

All of these free tools are great and they can really help you build your keyword list for link building SEO, but they have one drawback and that is that it takes an incredible amount of time to use them effectively. As we all know — time is money. The less time you need to spend on keyword research the more time you have to actually build sites and make money.

I have tried a lot of commercial keyword tools and there is only one that I use consistently. It does everything you need to pick winning keywords and it does it fast. You can generate suggested keywords, you can find commercial intent, and you can get a very accurate measure of competition and know exactly what you need to do to beat the competition.

That last point is very important. What it tells you is how many links the competitors have that use the keyword as the linking text. Once you know that you know that if you can get more keyword anchored links you can beat their search engine ranking.

This tool is called:

WebComp Analyst

It is worth every penny of it’s reasonable price because it can save you hundreds of hours of time and make you hundreds or even thousands of dollars with the information it provides.

If you are serious about link building SEO and making money online you will want this tool.

The report is short enough to read in one sitting, but powerful enough to read again, print out, and use as your guide to getting top search engine rankings for every site you build.

Here are just a few of the  SEO gems you will discover:

• What you MUST have in place if you want top rankings
• How to optimize any web page in minutes
• How to pick keywords that will make money
• Essential free tools to save you time and money
• How and where you can get great one way links for free

Run on over to the sign up page and get yours now: Free Report

Keyword Rich Anchor Text

One of the most important characteristics of good SEO links is to have the anchor text be the keyword phrase for which you are trying to improve your search engine rankings. The anchor text is also known as link text and is the words that display on the page for your link. Remember that you often don’t have direct control over the wording used to link to your site. Most of the time people will link to your site by either the site name or the page title. That is one reason you should create your blog and page titles with your primary keywords.

Keyword Diversity

The search engines, particularly Google, will rank your page much better if the linking appears natural. That means there should be some randomness to the characteristics of the links. If you get 1000 links to your site all using your primary keyword phrase it does not look natural and your ranking may be penalized. When you have control over the anchor text you should vary the keyword phrases being used.

Keyword Context

You will find when you do your own SEO link building or you work with in an SEO link building service that many of your links will be part of a link list. The sites linking to you may have a list on the side panel for links. While these links are still helpful they are not the best SEO links. The most effective links are those that appear in the text of the page especially when that text is relevant to the page being linked.

Website and Page Topic

Keep in mind that the search engines have the primary mission of providing relevant links based on the search being performed. A large part of determining that relevancy is placing a higher value on links from sites on the same topic. This is something of the same effect as the keyword context mentioned above. For example, suppose you are doing search engine optimization for a page about blue running shoes. You would want to look to get links from other sites is topic is running shoes. And, if you can get a link from a page on that site about blue running shoes you have a very valuable boost to your link building SEO.

Website Authority

Website authority can be viewed as how much the search engines trust the website. There are a lot of factors that go into website authority and they include the age of the website, which other sites link to them, how focused they are on a particular topic, and what sites they link to. This is one way the search engines fight link spam. Link spam is defined as links coming from sites designed specifically for the purpose of link building SEO with no real content. There are many link building companies that build their entire SEO link building service using link spam. If you can get authority sites to link to your pages you are showing that your site also has value and deserves higher rankings.

Link Diversity

Is a good idea to get links from as many different domains and from as many different types of sites as possible. For example, a popular SEO link building technique is to post pages on free websites and blogs and link back to your main site. You can make this strategy much more effective if you use a number of different sites. Instead of creating 10 Squidoo lenses you can create three lenses, three hub pages, two WordPress blogs and two blogger sites.

Links per Page

Another SEO link building factor to consider is the number of links per page. You will get much more value if the page linking to you as half a dozen links then if the page has hundreds of links. Basically the more links on the page the more diluted the effect of links. However, this effect can be mitigated by some of the other factors we discussed. For example, a page on an authority site with 50 links could be more valuable than the link from a less established site with only five links on the page.

You need to take these link building SEO principals together and find the balance that is right for your site. You seldom will be able to put them all together at once, but if you can  manage to follow most use principles most of the time you’ll end up with very successful SEO links and a very successful website.

Want to learn more? I’ve written a free report that will help you achieve Fast and Easy Search Engine Ranking.