Here’s some advice that I now feel comfortable sharing, since links from .edu’s really aren’t as powerful as they once were now that their “weight” has become fairly common knowledge. Follow the steps below and essentially you’ll be killing two birds with one stone, if you’re:

1) looking for employees but don’t want to pay the high costs of recruiters, employment agencies, job sites, etc.
2) looking for .edu links but, again, don’t want to pay (man you’re cheap) and need to keep the links natural looking to remain under the radar

Now, the first part is you need to be hiring on the website that you’d like to build .edu links to (or at least have a page with employment information to point people at). I actually took it a step further by creating a “current jobs” page that linked to a PDF file containing a detailed job description for each position (you’ll see why later). At the bottom of the PDF file, I created a few short “about us” paragraphs that link to my homepage as well as a few select sub-pages (using keyword targeted anchor text, of course).

Part two is to search for “post job site:.edu”, “job board site:.edu”, and other related terms while making sure to include the site:edu modifier. Email the webmaster from each of the sites you find to ask them to post the job opening on their site (I had pretty good response rates with this). I am by no means suggesting that you spam a bunch of educational institutions; again, make sure that you’re actually hiring. 🙂

TIP: Some .edu sites have job boards that allow you to automatically submit and post job info without any kind of verification; be wary of these sites as they may have already been attacked by spammers. Read through some of the current job posts and ensure everything looks legit before posting.

For the quality .edu sites that allow you to post your job info, make sure to include a few paragraphs at the end that describe your company, including links to your homepage and a few deep links to your site.

Some sites won’t allow direct links to your site from the job post, because HTML markup isn’t allowed. That’s fine, because this is where the PDF files that I created in part one come in handy. Ask them to post the PDF (that includes your “about us” section with embedded links) on their site.

Obviously these aren’t going to be the most powerful .edu links in the world, but if done properly the links gained can help compliment your overall link profile.