And then things became a little fancier and you could host a form on your site to allow people to send others links to your site. By email.

Plug-ins soon came along, and you could embed content from other sites in your site. And let visitors provide their own content (comments, etc) on your site.

All on your site. Or sent by email.

The great thing these days is that you can easily provide tools to allow visitors to share your content on other sites for you, and to follow your site on other sites. Its about moving the conversation.

Two tools which really illustrate this are Twitter and Add This. I’ve written before about Twitter and how I’ve integrated it into London for Free. I’ve already attracted quite a few followers – people who now don’t need to come back to my site to see info I’ve added about events. Instead, they will see my twitter post on either twitter itself or a twitter content aggregation site.

Add This is an excellent plug-in to allow visitors to London for Free to share it on other sites such as Facebook, delicious and more. And every time they do, it doesn’t just benefit them. It benefits my site. The more times my site can be linked to the likes of Facebook and other popular sites, the better. Though these links aren’t treated as proper inbound links by search engines, they help to advertise my site.

Two simple ways to promote your site on other sites and support conversations by visitors about it anywhere.

Though site traffic is slightly down from the old version of the site (when comparing April to May) the number of pages visited per user is far higher.

Less visitors but deeper visits – I’m happy with that. The lower number of visitors overall could be to do with easter being early this year, and I guess a true traffic comparison won’t be possible for 11 months or so.

And the earnings from google ads have shot up enormously. The figures for the past 28 days since the new site was launched have already well exceeded the earnings from the old site for all of 2008 (Jan 1 to April 23). I think most of this increase is due to the automated optimising by google of the adwords displayed, and by displaying more adwords throughout the site.

Time to take stock and think about how to improve these trends even more.

Something that links these two factors together are google keywords. Most of my traffic comes via the google search engine – and my google adsense earnings are generated by people clicking on adverts on my site.

So time to tighten up the use of keywords by improving their relevance and value: ensuring that my site appears as high as possible when people type in relevant search terms in google, and also ensuring that the most relevant (and highest value) adwords appear on my site.

Meet google’s keyword tool. Though it seems designed more for advertisers than for sites displaying their adwords, its excellent for showing two key pieces of info:

- the keywords most relevant to my site’s content that aren’t currently displaying my site in their search results

- the value of those keywords in terms of advertiser competition

Running the tool for my site, I have now identified a number of high value and relevant keywords that my site’s content isn’t optimised for. e.g. “London sightseeing tour”. Testing it in google search confirms that my site appears nowhere (well, not in the first 4 pages of results, anyway).

So as its a high value search term and deemed by google to be relevant to my site’s content, its time to do some optimising.

I now see a morning of content editing ahead of me.

Writing page descriptions into the metadata of each key page of my site which include the high value, relevant keywords, and lightly peppering the keywords through the body of my site content.

It will be interesting to see in another month what impact if any these changes have had.