Been missing me?  Sorry!  I’m immersed in family matters at the moment.  However, below is a guest post from Sam who has had some very good results from following my advice in a Recent Ask Kirsty.

Here he describes in his own words how a few really simple steps helped him “get it on” with that fickle mistress we all know and love, Google….

Now, in my experience it takes a lot longer than 5 minutes to win over any lady (unless, of course, they are heavily inebriated), but with Kirsty’s help, I did just that, to a teetotal girl called Google (my parents would be so proud of me). Let me explain…

Kirsty has very kindly given me the opportunity to provide feedback, following the advice I received for my Lawn Mower Review affiliate site. In the original ‘Ask Kirsty’ post, I outlined some of the fundamental problems I was having, and received some great answers.

I’ve since put some of Kirsty’s suggestions into practice, and had some fantastic results, which I’d like to share with you all.

One of my biggest frustrations was with indexing. Despite being very nice to Google, giving her a beautiful site map, providing her with delicious incoming links from Digg, and even waiting weeks for her (I didn’t want to rush our relationship), she still refused to sleep with me fully index my site. This was a big problem, as without my site fully indexed, I was missing out on serious traffic.

This is where Kirsty (relationship councillor extraordinaire) came in. Kirsty suggested one of the reasons why Google didn’t love me, was because of the internal cross-linking between pages on my site. Now, I hadn’t really thought about this before, but after improving the sitation (linking to every page, from every other page), and giving Google what she really wanted (the cross-link diamond ring, if you will) my site and Google really hit it off.

I basically achieved this by including a footer on each one of my pages, this literally took 5 minutes to do, and ensured I had good cross-links throughout my site. Now, it should be noted that there are better ways to do this. I used this quick-fix method just to test Google, a bit like treating her to a new Mini-Cooper test drive, before actually buying it for her. Now that I’ve seen she likes the new Mini-Cooper, I may well develop more graceful cross-links (next/previous buttons for example, to navigate through each lawn mower review).

This immediately improved the indexing situation, I went from having just 42 pages indexed, to 200, in a very short space of time:

And thus, with more pages indexed, I caught more keywords, and approximately doubled my organic traffic:

…and all in the space of a day (ok, so she needed some time to think about it, but fell for me in the end). We’ve since lived happily ever after, and she’s even started giving me gifts, by putting me in the #1 spot for certain keywords!

So, for any love sick folks out there, wanting to improve your indexing situation, be sure to not overlook the cross-link diamond ring!

It would be great to hear your comments on this.

Comment from Kirsty: -

Gosh darn it, I think that was a fab post! From my POV it really is fantastic to hear that my advice has helped people achieve such great results.  Well done to Sam for a really nicely worded and laid out bit of affiliate blogging.  Really enjoyed reading it!