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.

I’ve been using two of them for some time now on my current site: Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

The webmaster tools are invaluable for helping to highlight orphan / dead urls within your site e.g. for those occasions where you once thought a particular page was a great idea, created lots of internal links to it and then later deleted the page from your site.

And I have now discovered a new feature in the tools – (ok, maybe its been there for a while and I’m slow on the uptake).

They provide a section called Content Analysis. In particular, it lists the pages in your site that have duplicate short and long meta descriptions. Very handy as I update the meta data on my new site pages.

Google Analytics has always provided more information about my site than I think I will ever need to use. But in checking for the tracking code to use on my new site, I noticed that they have updated it.

Its hidden in the depths of their app and wasn’t easy to find (you can locate it under Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Tracking Code). But in there they provide a new tracking code called ga.js.

This is Google’s explanation about this new code:

Use this tracking code to gain access to a wide range of exciting new features as they become available.

I’m not sure how long its been there – and whether the “new features” are actually available now but I was pleased to have discovered it: another thing to add to my new site.