I received an intriguing announcement this morning about Local.com partnering with Earthlab for the 2008 Earth Day Challenge. 

Do you see what I did there? I linked, from a relatively well-established weblog, to three websites. If you want to generate more inbound links (which in my opinion is the most important factor for generating traffic from natural listings at popular search engines) consider joining forces with nonprofit organizations. Give them your software, donate a few extra dollars from your pocket or develop a joint promotional venture. This might take a decent investment of time, but you will be raising awareness of your products or services, the charity iteself and, if you ask politely, you may even find that you get a few inbound links in the process.

If you're looking to score some links through sponsorship and charities, just search for a keyword and append "charity" or "sponsor" in the search query. While you may not get thousands of opportunities, you will most definitely find some good ones that will benefit your SEO efforts and the efforts of those nonprofits.

From the release: "Local.com and EarthLab are joining forces with companies and nonprofit organizations throughout the United States to raise awareness for environmental responsibility by encouraging individuals nationwide to take the 2008 Earth Day Challenge. The goal of the Challenge is to have 1 million people take the EarthLab Carbon and Lifestyle Calculator test in the month of April and reduce their scores by 15 percent by the end of 2008."

Certainly a noble goal and worthy of note.

Check your carbon footprint at ReplaceATree.org