Earn Links from Government (.gov) and Academic (.edu) Websites

Google, Yahoo, and MSN place greater "trust" in referrals from .gov and .edu websites because they are less likely than .com websites to be spammy or commercially influenced.

As a result, a keyword-rich text link from a .gov or .edu website can improve the ranking of your webpage in search engines and therefore generate substantial indirect traffic.

A good strategy for obtaining government referrals is to seek links on .gov resources pages that are related to your cause.

A good strategy for obtaining .edu referrals is to seek links from professors who teach courses related to your cause. For instance, an economics professor might be glad to share a link with his macroeconomics students that points to your report on the benefits of free trade.

The best time to approach professors with a link suggestion is during August, late December, and early January. Most professors are posting course information during this time and will be more open to suggestions than during the middle of a semester.

Better still, write a white paper that convincingly refutes or sheds greater insight on a chapter in a popular college textbook. Then, call or email professors who teach from that textbook and invite them to link to your white paper, which gives their students an important perspective that is missing from the textbook.

Note: Search engines do not place the same level of trust in all .edu pages. For instance, a referral link to your website from a school library's homepage will have a much more powerful impact on your search engine ranking than a link from a student's personal page.

Another caveat: Some colleges use course management systems, such as WebCT, that "hide" their deep content from crawling by search engines. So, target link requests only to relevant .edu pages that are indexed by Google.