Give Back to the Community for Links

Posted on | December 8, 2005 | 3 Comments

One way to get “natural” links is to offer your product or service to non-profit and community organizations. This works especially well if you sell non-tangible products such as software. Often non-profit organizations cannot afford your software so there is no opportunity cost. Not to mentioned possible tax benefits.

Donate your software to a struggling school district (or find out what social service programs are facing budget cuts). Out of this one could get “natural” links from the school, school board and city government website. Plus some links from the local media.

If your company is not in the position to donate the product you sell find something else. Offer to pick up the organization hosting bill or have their website redesigned. Buy them some computers.

The reason to value links from non-profit and community organizations is they tend to have a lot of backlinks from government and education sites. True the local non-profit might only have 20 backlinks. I bet most of those backlinks are high-quality with a large percentage from city government, education and other non-profits websites.

Make sure to ask them for a full page article on their website about what you are donating. That way you can get your links embedded in content. It is also less obvious than getting the traditional “homepage” link.

Category: Link Building

Comments

3 Responses to “Give Back to the Community for Links”

Jason Hendricks
December 9th, 2005 @ 7:30 pm

Great post, Justilien. We receive tons of inquiries from these types of organizations and we’ve been providing free or extremely discounted services to non-profit, government, and educational institutions for years and it’s a great way to gain natural links. Many times I didn’t even have a chance to ask for the link yet before noticing it on their website!

We have also successfully negotiated our own individual folders on their website complete with FTP access. We post targeted content for the exact purpose you mention above, creating “perfect link” pages. The majority of these sites have stale or very little content, so providing them with updated material while garnering powerful links is a win-win for all parties involved.
Justilien
December 11th, 2005 @ 9:19 am

Glad to see you read my site Jason! It is great when people have such success as your company and validate in public what others recommend. I am glad the concept of pre-sell (content) pages is helping your company. As Search Engines get better at devaluing traditional paid links the people working very hard at building high-quality backlinks will be the ones rewarded now and into the future.

The other aspect I like about helping out organizations is it goes a long way to building your brand name and reputation. You may even land a few government contracts from people following your links
Justilien Gaspard – Local Search Interview
November 3rd, 2009 @ 4:34 pm

[...] your business. If you are helping them they will be more than happy to link to you. I did a post on giving back for links in 2005 with more ideas on this [...]

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Justilien Gaspard is a SEO/M consultant with over 8 years experience in organic search marketing. Professionally he's a columnist for Search Engine Watch, speaker at SES Conferences and has authored 3 advanced courses for SEMPO Institute. Learn more about Justilien.