This is an excerpt from my ebook, How to Crash People’s Parties.

There are two sides to SEO – on-page and off-page. On-page is about creating the right content for the keywords you’re going after, and inserting those keywords into your content. Off-page is about external signals, such as links. Links are votes of confidence in your site, so you want as many as you can get, but more importantly from the right sources. By definition, you can’t fully control your off-page SEO, but you can influence it.

As part of the SEO strategy for Watch Doctor Who, I designed and implemented a link building method that I call the ‘N’ method. By implementing the method, I successfully generated 5,000+ uniques/mo for the site, and I subsequently re-implemented it for Deal or No Deal Online.

Here is a diagram I created of it.

Diagram of the 'N' link building method

It will help you get natural links to your front and deep pages. You’re earning backlinks not creating them.

Steps 1–4

Steps 1–4 are essentially about finding link opportunities – in other words, pages from across the web that you think you have a good chance at getting your link onto. You’re ultimately going to email the owners of each page to request a link.

I like to complete steps 1–4 before even launching my site, for two reasons:

  1. When the site does eventually launch, you’ll have your list of link opportunities ready to go and you can start emailing them immediately.
  2. As you’ll find out, as part of the process of completing steps 1–4, you’ll learn of the kind of content you should create (the ‘replace broken’ technique)

Let’s explore each step in more detail.

Read the rest of this chapter in the full edition of How to Crash People’s Parties.