Every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Education market. We invite all of you out there to post (in the comments) a specific link building recommendation for the education market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “dofollow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed. 

So you might be thinking "why in the world do schools need to work at getting inbound links?  Heck, I am trying to get links from .edu’s!"  Let me assure you there are many educational institutions out there conduction link building all the time.  Admittedly, most of them are for profit or career colleges, but we know of many traditional schools building links to specific pages such as MBA and continuing education programs.

A word of caution: the affiliate business in the education market is huge.  Many education affiliate sites are very well done, have high PR and are pretty well established.  However, if you look hard enough, you can get direct links from those sites as they do need a number of outbound links that are not affiliate links.  With that said, here are some sites that link directly to educational institutions, they are PR3 to PR7 sites.  All of them were found by checking the Google backlinks of just two schools – one career college and one public school.  Image what a thorough search would provide.

At Campus Explorer, it is not obvious how to get your school listed here, but you should make the effort.  This site has over 3,500 Google backlinks to the home page.  Each school detail page has a direct link to the school along with a detailed description.  We suggest you use the contact us form at the bottom of the page.

Students Review has a couple ways for you to participate.  The obvious one is for students to review your school, but they also offer a forum which seems to be a bit unmoderated (if you know what I mean).

Peterson’s is a PR7 site and will take a little work for you to get listed.  They have many affiliate links but there are plenty of pages that have direct links to schools.  Most affiliate sites do need non-affiliate outbound links to help with their rankings.  Try the contact us at the bottom of the page.

College Tool Kit is pretty interesting.  Lots of great info and a PR7.   Looks like you will also need to use the contact form at the bottom page.

Edu Registry is an affiliate site, but has a nice list of schools by state.  Looks like you need to use the email address at the bottom of their page to contact them.

RateMyProfessors is a bit of a social site and it is pretty obvious what needs to be done here to get a link (or many links).  Reach out to some of your students and go for it!

US School Directory is a pretty straight forward site listing schools by state.  Looks like you need to use their contact form to request a listing and they may require a reciprocal link.

OK – there are 7 really nice opportunities for links TO education sites.  Now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice for link building for the education market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "dofollow" link from us.

Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market. 

WE NEED VOTES!  Please be sure to vote for your market today!  VOTE HERE

[tags] education links, career colleges, schools, edu links, students review, school directory, vertical markets, education niche, education market, link building [/tags]

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Welcome to “Do Follow” Tuesdays. To read what this is all about, you can check our announcement post.  Be sure to vote for your market today!  VOTE HERE  

In summary, every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week we cover Ecommerce Retail Websites. We invite all of you out there to post in the comments a specific link building recommendation for the Ecommerce market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “do follow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed. 

This week’s suggestion from our staff comes in the form of a variety pack.  We will recommend some specific link building tactics and we will recommend a couple of great resources for more information as it relates to ecommerce sites.

Articles – we still believe articles can be a very effective link building method if you take your time and do it correctly.   Correctly means writing (or having someone write) unique, valuable content and submitting them to related sites on a limited basis.   Don’t blast it out to hundreds of free article directories, instead look for a few niche sites related to your business.  Here are several websites we found in less than 30 minutes covering a variety of topics:  Business Know How,  Women in Business,  All Merchants,  Fiber to Fashion, and the Art of Retail Management.  Depending on your niche, you should be able to think of an article these sites would be interested in posting, that just happen to have a couple of links back to your site.

Resources – Justilien wrote a great article on building links for online retail and e-commerce sites.   Here is a good article on tapping your suppliers for links.   Here is a list of 20 cheap ways to get links to your ecommerce site.  Lastly, Jason Boom discusses Yahoo Answers and other techniques on his blog.

OK, now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice for link building for the e-commerce & online retail market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "do follow" link from us.

Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market. 

Be sure to vote for your market today!  VOTE HERE  

[tags] ecommerce, retail stores online, ecommerce websites, online retail, vertical markets, niche, markets, link building [/tags]

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Welcome to “Do Follow” Tuesdays. To read what this is all about, you can check our announcement post.   Be sure to vote for your market today! **VOTE HERE**  

In summary, every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Golf Course market.  We invite all of you out there to post in the comments a specific link building recommendation for the golf course market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “do follow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed. 

This week’s suggestion from our staff is based on the "teach a man to fish" theory.  Below are some examples of searches you can conduct to find good golf course links (get it?).  Set aside 15 minutes to try these searches, you will be amazed at what you will find.  We have even provided some commentary on what we found with each search.

We ran a search for one .edu, .org, .gov and .com in the examples listed below.  So you can image how many options there will be if you rotate through all of four of those extensions, and make them regionalized by adding your state or city. 

site:.org "Arizona golf courses" – 1,510 results on Google, we found a few nice opportunities right on the first page
site:.edu "golf course directory" – 66 results on Google, many look promising
site:.gov "golf course" "resources page" - 116 results on Google, not the best, but some look promising
site:.com "list of golf courses" – 28,800 results on Google, we didn’t bother looking – that should be enough to keep you busy!

Conduct those searches on Google, Yahoo & MSN and click through the results.  Look for quality sites, you don’t want to be associated with huge link pages or spammy sites.

OK, now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your suggestions for link building for the golf course market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "do follow" link from us.

Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market. 

Be sure to vote for your market today! VOTE HERE  

[tags] golf courses, golf course links, golf course market, vertical markets, niche, markets, link building [/tags]

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Welcome to “Do Follow” Tuesdays. To read what this is all about, you can check our announcement post. 

In summary, every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll.  This week it is the Hotel & Resort market. We invite all of you out there to post in the comments a specific link building recommendation for the Hotel & Resort market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “do follow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed. 

This week’s suggestion from our staff is all about social media.  We get a lot of questions about how to use social media to increase links to a website.  There are hundreds, probably thousands of social sites that, if worked properly, will provide opportunities for you to get links to your site.   Below are three examples for the hotel & resort industry.

Flickr - Upload your hotel or resort pictures, and then link to your website in your profile.  Aside from displaying your property, Flickr can be used in many creative ways.  Pictures of events, staff and local entertainment can be used as well.  If your images are unique and optimized, you might even find them hitting the search results themselves.  And remember, many people conduct images searches which may lead them back to your website.  Here is a short example of how to use Flickr for SEO.

YouTube – After conducting a bunch of searches looking for hotels making good use of YouTube, we have concluded this is an area that can really be exploited.  In other words, we didn’t find much.  Create a YouTube channel and post your SEO optimized videos.  These do not have to be expensive, TV quality videos.  Many successful videos are created by amateurs and edited with inexpensive software.  But, they do need to be clever or add value to the viewer.

43 Places – This site has evolved into a solid social site about travel.  It carries some decent authority with its links.  Being featured on 43 Place’s can create some great promotion, and hotel would be smart to add their URLs to their 43 Places entries.  For example a hotelier in Phoenix should check out and get involved in this section on 43Places.  

OK, now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice for link building for the hotel & resort market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "do follow" link from us.

Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market. 

Be sure to VOTE for your market today!  VOTE HERE  

[tags] hotel links, resorts, travel links, hospitality links, vertical markets, niche, markets, link building, YouTube, Flickr, 43Places [/tags]

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Welcome to “Do Follow” Tuesdays. To read what this is all about, you can check our announcement post. 

In summary, every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Home Builder market. We invite all of you out there to post in the comments a specific link building recommendation for the Home Builder market (a good directory, authority website, blog, link search, etc.). If it adds value, we will approve it, give you the credit and a “do follow” link to your site. However, we will just delete stupid, irrelevant, spammy comments – only truly useful information will be allowed. 

This week’s suggestion from our staff is on conducting searches for links.  This is often overlooked by SEO’s, maybe because it takes a little more work than some other link building efforts, but it can often turn up a hidden gem as seen in this post.  Here are three different Google search queries that you might want to try if you were looking for great places to get a link for a home builder site.

1) Take a look at the results for the most basic of searches "home builder links".  Notice the 2nd listing is for constructionstate.com – an nice little niche directory dedicated to this industry.  There are more than 3,000 search results to check out.

2) Libraries are good links to have.  Check out the results from "home builder" library site:.us  About the 5th one down is this link, get any ideas from it?

3) Well we did.  How about looking for sponsor opportunities like this "texas home builders” sponsorship? 

There are many, many more creative searches that you can deploy to find linking opportunities (new home builders, custom home builders, luxury home builders, etc).  Admittedly, it takes time and many lead to dead ends or overdone reciprocal link pages, but you will find plenty of good links if you stick with it.

OK, now lets hear from the rest of you. Place your advice for link building for the home builder market in the comments below. Those that are accepted will get a nice "do follow" link from us.

Make sure you sign up for our email or RSS feed so that you are alerted every time a new niche market is covered. Even if we are not focusing on your niche, you just might see a pretty creative idea that will trigger an thought for your market. 

Be sure to vote for your market today! VOTE HERE  

[tags] home builder links, home builders, vertical markets, niche, markets, link building [/tags]

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