HitTail & Google Analytics: The Perfect Pairing

Here's a nice blog post over at Transparent Real Estate. It's part of the continuing trend of bloggers mentioning Google Analytics and HitTail in the same breath. Everyone appreciates the awesome value of getting such a full featured product as Urchin (Google Analytics) for free, but at the same time, it has a frustrating day-long delay (or more) before seeing results, and once you see them, a special analytics-analyzing skill-set in able to turn it into immediate site-improving actions.

HitTail on the other hand gives you almost no analytics, but shows you the hits instantly. And it's amazing the value simply in that. HitTail will achieve much of its mission in life if it can simply give everyone in the world real-time access to the part of their web logs that's truly interesting--the search hits and other referrals. Once you filter out all the nonsense graphics and in-site clicks, watching the raw log file data gets real interesting.

But then, there's the dilemma of getting from that raw data to an extracted keyword list. And people seem to appreciate HitTail's doing this for you in nearly real-time, sorting the wheat from the chaff as it were. You have one list which is all extracted keywords, and another list which are only those where you really could and should be doing better in natural or paid search results.

And finally, HitTail goes one step beyond solving this dilemma by helping your remember what you've done. Every time you export your keyword lists, you have an opportunity to move all those keywords to the trash. So, the HitTail lists are cleared, and you're only ever looking at new words. This makes HitTail work as a perfect "keyword radar" system, only bringing new events to your attention that have never happened before.

All this culminates in a time-saving process that gives you not only actionable data, but an actionable plan. Simply take the words that HitTail provides and either funnel them directly into your PPC campaigns, or work them into the headlines of your new blog posts or website content. Sustained over time, it can snowball your sites ability to pull in the best sort of qualified prospects at continually lower costs. And ultimately, that is the mission of HitTail, the reason for its existence, and the primary driver behind our product development decisions.

Converting Prospects Into Customers

Yesterday, I was interviewed on Justin Hitt's radio call-in program, and spoke to a virtual room full of business people. The call went well, and we covered a lot of familiar ground. But the point that came up early that I want to mention here is what HitTail does not do for a site.

As is the opening schpeil of many traffic-driving services, you can drive all the traffic in the world to a site, but if the site is not capable of capturing and converting prospects into customers (or subscribers), then all the traffic in the world isn't going to help. HitTail doesn't fix fundamentally broken sites. So, we launched into the tiniest bits of key advice you can use to quickly fix any site.

First of all, there is exactly one click-path through a site that's important. That's from whatever page you land on to your "call-to-action" page. And in all cases that should be precisely one-click from whatever page you landed on.

Justin asked whether this meant adjusting your on-page copy (or blog post) to put the call-to-action in the text, maybe as the final parting message. I countered with the fact that this tends to influence your writing style and priorities too much, and maybe drive away readers with too much of a sales-y pitch. Instead, it's best to embed your call-to-action directly into the navigational graphics of your site.

And if you're using Blogger and your site resides in a subdirectory of your existing site, it's a very easy matter of seamlessly intermixing your main website with the blog location where you're HitTailing. In other words, your blog is pretty much indistinguishable from the rest of your site, and has all the same navigational graphics as any other page of your site. And those navigational graphics contain your overarching message, or perhaps a 800 number, and most certainly your "Contact" link.

The idea is that any site, no matter how fundamentally broken, can have a few light touches to the graphics that are pervasive throughout the site so that your call-to-action is only one click away. This is a very powerful technique for HitTailers to convert their increasing levels of traffic from qualified prospects into actual customers.

Crushing The Competition

So, there's definitely a competitive edge to HitTailing. The idea is to dominate a conceptual niche. It's not really to the "exclusion" of your competitors, because that would be too spammy, but it is quite possible to keep corralling your target audience back to your site over and over and over. And it is inevitable that your competition will keep encountering you during their keyword testing, and you are likely to frustrate them to no end. But the real satisfaction is being all over the keyword results they're not even thinking of testing--but the actual prospective customers ARE.

When I was first playing around with long tail keyword optimization, it was in an emerging industry with lots of small fish (both in terms of competitors and prospective customers). I started out in a company named Scala which already had a long history in a related space that transitioned very naturally into the emerging industry of digital signage (hanging monitors and cable TV computer channels). But no one knew what the practice of using flat panel TVs as signs was going to be called. It could have been anything from "electronic displays" to "out of home advertising". It was really wacky the terms that were popping up. One thing I intuitively sensed was that to name the industry in the formative stages was to exert extreme control on the market as it developed.

And so it was true. After I moved on from that company to a NY PR firm, I was contacted by two of my biggest competitors from my previous life in digital signage. I learned exactly how frustrating it was to them how Scala had dominated the conceptual niche of digital signage--no matter what you thought to call it. Blogs weren't so big at the time, and I simply called my writing "vignettes." They were micro-stories about how digital signage might be used, and it gave me opportunity to experiment with different names and ideas. Each time I posted, Google promptly picked up the post and my systems suggested new terms. Before long, I not only dominated a conceptual niche, but found myself in the position of shaping it--because all online research led back to me (my writing).

Though people didn't cite me very much directly (what competitor would), I saw my language reoccurring everywhere I looked. I was defining the very rules by which digital signage solutions would be measured. And I am fairly certain it predisposed the entire base of prospective customers for digital signage toward Scala solutions in a way that's still paying off for them to this very day.

Well its a few years later, and those competitors are a few years wiser, and of course I'm not with Scala anymore. HitTail is being offered as a free service to the world, and competitors who were previously frustrated by the existence of an in-house secret weapon that was so devastating that it kept them from even being at the table, now suddenly find the playing field a little more even.

But this evolution of search engine marketing savvy has not occurred in every industry yet. There is still ample opportunity to crush the competition by achieving niche dominance. However, the onus is on you to start sooner rather than later, because natural search results don't move fast. They have a great deal of inertia (Google more than most), so it's like moving the Queen Mary. So, if you're in a race, there are two things that are most important...

1. Putting the energy into the race now.
2. Not letting your competition know it's on.

Search Marketing Services

I remember back in the very earliest days of the formation of the SEO/SEM industry, the debate raging around what to call it. Everyone had pretty much settled on SEO (for search engine optimization), even though some argued it was not technically accurate (were we optimizing search engines or sites). I weighed in on the side of SEO, because I argued that we were indeed optimizing the search engines themselves, no matter how indirectly. In those days, we were all on Search Engine Forums, the only SEO forum at the time.

Little did I know it, but a little company that was a client of my future employer was busily expanding the world of search by introducing pay-per-click. GoTo.com was to fork off a branch of online marketing that needed a new name. It only seemed natural to change "optimization" to the more general "marketing," and SEM was born. Everyone naturally started using SEO for practices where you don't pay the search engines directly, and SEM for services provided directly from the engines. And to this day, when you approach a firm, the disciplines are so dramatically different, that you'll usually find them specializing in one or the other.

With the automated tools for PPC campaign management improving every day, and increasing attempts to control costs, more campaigns are being brought in-house every day. To further this trend, Google is pursuing simplicity in campaign management tools and selection of products. Managing online campaigns will increasingly become like traditional media buys, and SEM firms (pay-per-click management) will be either increasingly squeezed or forced to evolve into something else. They may become more like ad agencies, managing brands and creative content. They may become more hard-core developers, building increasingly sophisticated campaign management tools to provide completive edge over Google's "simplified" interfaces.

Hence, the interest in the long tail in PPC--increasingly complex and difficult to manage keyword campaigns that are too burdensome to bring in-house, but still valuable enough to pursue. But the overhead of dumping hundreds of thousands of keywords into a campaign just isn't worth it. Instead, simply consider using HitTail to get your short sweet list of long tail keywords, and dump them into your campaign. Isolate the campaigns, and see how it compares to other campaigns. You may find some remarkable results.

So, if you're in the market for search marketing services, don't automatically narrow your chose to SEM or PPC management companies. Consider including agencies that address the entire integrated marketing mix, who bring healthier long-term strategies to the table including cross-engine, long-term natural search.

More Good News for Natural Search

David Berkowitz of 360i published an interesting article today over MediPost's Search Insider, provocatively named Google to PPC Branding: Drop Dead, in which he talks about Google's decision to stop serving premium sponsored links at the top of genuine search results after a few page reloads. The article says about 10 reloads, but I've seen the effect after as few as 3. Google's reasoning seems to go, if someone is clearly not going to click on a sponsored ad, why serve them?

This closes a loophole that Chris Anderson explored in this Cheating Google 101 in which he reasoned if he could get thousands of impressions and no click-through, he was getting free branding. Google gradually closes the loophole, now in two ways. First, they raise the cost-per-click on underperforming ads. Second, they reduce the overall impressions among surfers not predisposed to clicking ads. Fewer ads coupled with higher cost-per-click equals greater need to "optimize" PPC campaigns.

This creates an interesting dynamic in which relevant ads that create click-through (and probably those which convert more--but that's speculation) become less expensive. Because you're converting more, you have more feedback, more money, and more encouragement to continue optimizing your campaigns and raising your budget. It's a classic example of success breeding success--and search results becoming more relevant as a result.

This dynamic also increases the value of the natural search results, merely by virtue of there being less advertising clutter for those searchers determined to not click ads. Hold out against clicking ads long enough, and you stop receiving ads--brilliant! Imagine a TiVo that detects that if you're skipping over commercials frequently enough, it starts editing out commercials. Marketers could only get their message across if they got into the TV shows through product placement or guest appearances.

The links between natural search engine optimization and public relations continue to sharpen.

Ideas For Preventing Click Fraud

So, I just read the BusinessWeek article on click fraud, and it's interesting that the figure they open up with is the calculated loss of $100,000 in almost 4 years. Contrast this with Gary Beal's disclosed projected savings of $90,000 to his client in one year, using HitTail keywords in his AdWords campaigns. So, how might one avoid click fraud of and achieve some savings? And is HitTail actually a path to reversing click fraud?

To avoid the type of large-scale click fraud described in the article, simply put, keep your ads from running across the AdSense network, where site owners have incentive for the ads to be dishonestly clicked. In the AdWords interface, you can add new campaigns as keyword-targeted or site-targeted. With keyword-targeted, you can have your results come up only in search, only in the AdSense network or both. You're only susceptible to click fraud when it's on the AdSense network. With site-targeted, you choose which sites you want your ad to appear on the AdSense network, and are automatically susceptible to click fraud.

So, to avoid click fraud, simply constrain your campaigns to search... but you lose out on having ads run across the Internet. So, it's a trade-off to see if it's worth it. It turns out that in some industries, where the cost-per-click and site revenues are potentially highest, you are most susceptible to click fraud.

There's a different kind of click fraud hardly discussed in the article, which is clicks by competitors to deplete your advertising budget. The way to deal with this is to set a daily spending limit and to disperse your clicks throughout the day (a control in the user interface). By doing that, you minimize daily risk (your whole budget cannot be wiped out) and frustrate clickers (ads stop being served until you come back later that day).

But even more you can do to protect yourself is to use lucrative, but difficult-to-guess keywords in your campaign, so competitors just don't know what to type in to get your ad. And Gary Beal taught us that keyword lists exported from HitTail have just that effect. You reach a much broader array of your potential customers by producing way more impressions. But simultaneously, you do this with a much broader array of effective keywords that confounds competitors because they cannot be easily guessed.

Long Tail, Schmong Tail

There's no doubt that we wrapped the concept of HitTail in the popular notion of the long tail, and even our long tail chart is a concession to marketing pressures. This post is to downplay the importance of the long tail itself and to play up the importance of the HitTail's time-saving characteristics.

Long tail marketing isn't about pursuit of the long keyword list. It's about pairing it down the list to the tiny bit that matters. Chasing the long tail of search is a potential endless time-sink if you're not careful. And simply adding a long tail chart to analytics software may just aggravate the quagmire of analytics paralysis.

When you watch our demo, we even go as far as to say that the first three tabs are for looks only. HitTail, which provides precisely one long tail chart, is receiving greater accolades than the analytics software, because people simply find it more useful. The precise reasons are built in layers of philosophy and method that culminate in a surprising degree of simplicity.

Recently, HitTail came under some criticism for being fluff, and it took me some time to bring the party around to understanding that the investment of a few moments of time to install some tracking code could cut hours off of your long tail keyword marketing efforts. The concept of the long tail is so loaded with the idea of implicit time investment that I sometimes look for other ways to describe it.

Some have suggested that HitTail suggestions are found in the middle of the long tail. But the truth is that there's little correlation between a HitTail keyword suggestion and its current position in the long tail chart, except for the fact that they're lower than the head and upwardly mobile. The phrase may have received a half-dozen hits in the middle, or one hit in the tail. A schpeckling of other criteria makes all the difference.

Anyway, this post was necessary to put the long tail in its place--subordinate to the time-saving benefits yielded by HitTail. Although an invaluable tool in describing why HitTail works, focusing too much on the long tail is something of a wild goose chase insofar as optimizing for SEO. Google itself says that almost half of all searches are unique. So, it's insane to go optimizing for that one search phrase that's only going to occur once--just as it is insane to optimize for the one or two-word combo that the rest of the world has set its sights on.

HitTail is about sanity. HitTail is about picking the low-hanging fruit. HitTail is about navigating a clear path into the world of natural search. HitTail is about saving you time as you crack the natural search nut.

Of ClickFraud and Content Theft

Last week, BusinessWeek mentioned HitTail as a way to build a better mousetrap to capture traffic for your blog. This week, BusinessWeek's front cover is dedicated to Click Fraud. I see solving simultaneous equations at work here. Minimize your exposure to click-fraud while maximizing the un-paid traffic received from organic search. The pressure is on for the world of mainstream marketing to come around to the natural search way of thinking, and HitTail is positioned in the path of that tornado.

An underlying sub-theme of all of this is the pages rolled out across the Internet for the sole purpose of attracting AdSense clicks. I run across these pages all the time, but one caught my attention in particular this morning in the way it syndicated HitTail blog content, but provided no link back to the HitTail site. I don't want to provide a link to them, but it does provide a good example of content theft.

Why does this constitute content theft while the dozens of other sites that syndicate HitTail content not? If you want to read more, you can't! There are ellipsis showing there is more to the article, but no way to get to it. The ONLY links off of that page are AdSense links. There's not even navigation links on the site.

Now, it's not a very big site, and none of the pages go back further than August 22nd. Sites like this pop up and get shut down all the time. The rub is, they only get shut down when they trigger off abusive patterns. But by only having 5 pages, they're flying well below the spam-threshold radar. So, my suspicion is that they own hundreds of such domains, and unsurprisingly, the domain is WhoIs Guard Protected.

Anyway, since there will inevitably be a resurgence of ClickFraud discussion on the Web this week, due to the BusinessWeek article, and I've already weighed in on that topic, I'll take this opportunity to steer some attention to the source of the problem. Google provides incentive to Webmasters to roll out tons of useless pages remixed content pages, which are only half-justified by links back to the original source. And when you remove the link to the original source, it's outright content theft.

Is HitTail the story, or is Connors?

Just yesterday, HitTail was pointed out on the Incredible Video blog as an innovative service with an innovative approach to marketing. Not long ago, we impressed the Web 2.0 Blog Network with our "very Web 2.0 promotion techniques" including quality intern work, the YouTube video and Digg article (not written by us). And earlier this month, such promotion almost exploded in our face, only to be turned into a "great job gentlemen" kudos post by Business Blog Consulting. And in the very first days of HitTail's birth, Gordon Gould, contributor to Weblogs, Inc., cited us for our impressive PR outreach.

So, while I love the news about HitTail, I'm equally excited to see that the public relations firm that incubated the product (yes, a PR firm did this) is receiving its share of the attention. For anyone looking for a public relations firm that really gets it, and has technological know-how, online outreach capabilities and search savvy, I encourage you to check out Connors.com or go directly to their contact page. Fair warning: PR like this doesn't come cheap. Connors is the PR agency that launched Amazon.com, Priceline and others. It's always looking for the next big thing and has a pretty good track record in determining whether you might be just that. It's worth contacting them (us) just on that basis alone--to see whether you make the cut to reach stage-2 in prospective client development.

So, what's my (Mike Levin) connection to Connors?

Yes, I'm one of their vice presidents. To make a long story short, I joined Connors to make "being found in search" an "of course!" component of public relations. And in the process, I formalized a long tail keyword optimization method that I have been developing for years, and tweaked it to sustain the server load incurred by some clients who had massive traffic on their sites (already--before even using our SEO services). In doing so, I realized that I had created a widely appealing and under-utilized tool that could help the great masses of bloggers build their natural search traffic and bring some real method to their site expansion strategies.

So, I proposed to Connors that I break it out of the custom SEO services and turn it into an overture to the world. Because you see, my long tail marketing methodologies were developed in difficult markets with very sexy, clearly differentiated products. This made it possible to construct a staggeringly clear sales pipeline where search-hits led to discussions led to quotes led to sales led to ongoing loyal customers led to word-of-mouth led to blog posts led to more search hits. Connors had pretty much everything but the sexy product. Connors is exceptional at PR, but the field of public relations is greatly undifferentiated. Connors fame comes from its impressive track record and ability to excel as a small "boutique agency" in NYC (as opposed to larger, perhaps less personal agencies). But in my mind, to build a decent pipeline of prospective clients, I needed that sexy product to establish the large mouth to the sales pipeline funnel.

So, there you have it. We were sitting on top of a sexy product in the form of one tiny little nuanced piece in our greater SEO services machinery, but it was difficult to communicate and had scaling issues (we all saw Google Analytics go down in its earliest days). So, I got to work solving both those issues.

As fate would have it, the release of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, was imminent. So we created the positioning and messaging around our product to make sure people understood it in the context of the keyword tsunami that is the long tail. The P&M became sort of a spiral development cycle, where each time I learned something new, I refined the message, never overly-committing to one course. Over time, I realized that I had a crossing-the-chasm issue, where the biggest danger of HitTail was impaling itself on its own early adopter success. For this thing to take flight, it needed to cross over and be embraced by the early majority. This manifested in the features and user-interface in countless ways that are almost transparent to the user and sometimes result it being dismissed as simple. But that's just the point--simplicity is a characteristic necessary for mainstream success. We didn't want to be the Rio of MP3 players. We wanted to be the iPod.

So, with the product ready for public beta and with the final difficulty of the mainstream value proposition to be communicated effectively, I locked myself in a room and didn't come out until I scripted the demo, learned Macromedia Flash, narrated the script, animated it and figured out how to do the highest quality YouTube video upload possible (which turned out to be Xvid encoding at the exact required size).

So, we linked this video in from every page of the HitTail site, and we've been watching the view-counter steadily grow. Now, we're not as popular as the 30-million visits to the evolution of dance video (stunning), but we are at aprox. 1,600 views. YouTube deals with the bandwidth issue, the email-to-a-friend feature and has a built-in audience. What more could you ask for?

But not to harp too much on the creative use of YouTube. The point I'm making with this post is that Connors not only had the creativity to make its own perfect fuge for a its own viral public relations campaign, but it also is on top of all the Web 2.0 tools that help, from YouTube to Technorati to Squidoo. And where the available tools fall short, Connors jumps right in with its own custom development efforts, achieving remarkable feats that don't see the light of day outside services provided directly to its clients--such as building our own wayback machine for serps, and spinning out complete search-optimized Website as alternative output from any existing content management system.

People love to play "let's pile on the PR guy" because PR gets a bad reputation from the bad practitioners. But because of PR's very un-orthodoxy, it's exactly the right field to lead the marketing evolution.

Beta Software Launch on Search Engine Forums

To discover whether HitTail was going to be a viable service, we soft-launched it, announcing it to no one except unofficially in the SEO forums. I figured they were going to be our harshest critics and our best feedback. And so, I was right. On the whole, the forums were remarkably open and receptive, and we received exactly the feedback we needed to engage in agile development. And we got to know the forums even better, and I share the biggest take-away's here in this post.

Some SEO forums are insular, and some are incredibly open. And the original Search Engine Forums where I made my start ended up (still) being the most open of all. This makes it the unsung hero of the field, receiving very little attention because of the recurring "green" topics that get rehashed over and over. It's almost painful for jaded SEOs to visit these days, but there are the rare few, like Duane Forrester, who when I ask why he still frequents it responded "I like to help people, and this is where they are." It's one of the most noteworthy search engine forums on the Internet for this reason and due to its habit of enthusiastically embracing "newbies." You'll find that most of the "old timers" who have moved onto other forums made their start here. If they say they didn't, they're lying, because it was the ONLY SEO forum until Doug and Brett started their own a few years later.

And so, we worked our way through the forums, looking for a specific type of feedback from each forum, based on their flavor. From Search Engine Forums, we looked for whether newbies could even "get" the long tail notion. From Doug Heil's ihelpyou forums, we sought the white hat perspective. From SearchEngineWatch, we looked for what the mainstreamers of the SES crowd thought. I also learned what some of the flavors of forums previously unknown to me were like, such as SEO Roundtable, SEO Refugee, SEO Chat (the best optimized forum), Cre8asite and HighRankings. I also discovered surprise "cross-over" forums that expressed interest and brought me into the discussion without me seeking them out, such as Digital Point and osCommerce. And finally, I discovered that a forum that I had originally thought was great, but discovered that it had become so insular that by the time I visited a thread where someone linked to us, it was gone.

It's a very different world than when I started out with the first and only Search Engine Forum back in 1998. If there's an identified marketing niche, then there's a forum, such as AdSensers and Affiliaters. It's just way too much to address every one, so I spiraled out from the center, starting with those who remembered me (SEF).

Because of Google PageRank and the link spamming epidemic, these forums have become particularly sensitive to link-dropping. And soft launching the HitTail service in these forums came dangerously close to link dropping, and could have backfired. But I was never one to walk away from a challenge if the pay-off was big enough, and my ace in the whole was my savoir-faire. I was an original "old-timer" in SEO though most of them forgot me. So, whenever the neighborhood pit-bull charged, I was able to happily deal like the dog breaker in Call of The Wild. I think it took some folks who wanted to play "let's pile on the PR guy" by surprise. To this day, one of the most satisfying experiences is when people see me associated with a PR company, assume they can tear me apart on technical issues, SEO experience or nuances.

The joy of sparring aside, we did learn some very important principles from our forum activity. First, HitTailing is useful to everybody at all levels of SEO. Even the advanced SEO pro's can benefit from it as a time-saving device. But pride and "not invented here" syndrome can pretty thoroughly close minds to the possibility (in some cases). For the beginner SEO, it's a great way to immediately take advantage of the long tail principle and make your services look quite advanced, for mainstream marketers it's an intimidation-free way to cut your teeth on organic search optimization, and for the great unwashed masses of bloggers, it's a never-ending flow of blogging ideas that just "seem right". We really struck a chord and have something that just may cross the chasm into mainstream marketing. That's the reason for naming it something that can be used as a verb (HitTailing).

Another thing we learned that there's a huge trust issue that needs to be overcome, and our mission involves taking some very counter-intuitive positions and holding them. We respect privacy at all costs. Everyone's data is their own, and there is no aggregating, cross-pollinating, identification of verticals, resale or otherwise. We just process each site's data and feed it back to them. We point out how a PR firm whose stock and trade is reputation cannot/will not violate this privacy. It is a covenant. And for the more technically inclined, we point out that although we use a cookie, it is the most privacy-respecting kind. It's a session-only non-persistent cookie. There's no unique ID's to identify users. And we publish a Platform for Privacy (p3p) policy that spells it all out. As a reward, our cookie works at the highest cookie-enabled security settings and doesn't set off any of the browser privacy warnings. Sticking to such a respectful privacy policy is critical to building trust.

And the last thing I learned from my rekindled emergence in the SEO forums is the nature of forum software itself--its strengths and weakness, and reasons for the proliferation of forums in recent years. Unlike blogging software, forums never fully embraced RSS feeds and pinging, so monitoring the forumosphere is a much bigger challenge than the blogosphere. Neither have forums fully become search engine friendly (some claim to have done so, but none are tweaked-out optimized like Movable Type or WordPress blogs). So, forums are to be relegated to being second-class citizens until they get as savvy as blog software. And finally, forums software is often free and so easy to set up, so anyone can do it. So, we did our own to support our HitTail effort.

Maybe we'll crack the nut of providing perfect forum software for HitTailing. No promises. Hmmm.

Search Vs. Advertising Vs. Public Relations

Over the last few days, our top referrers flip-flopped from natural Google hits leading to referrals from John Battelle's Search Blog leading. We watch this like a hawk, because with the HitTail domain only four months old, we have a rather clear view of where our traffic is coming from. And in the early days (June-July), it was almost exclusively word-of-mouth, in the form of bloggers. But when you looked at which websites sent the most referrals, Google was in the clear lead after only 2 months.

That's why it was with great interest that we watched John's blog pull out into the lead, pulling in front of the second-runner-up, which was Google AdSense clicks, which technically aren't clicks from a single source website, but the entire AdSense network. So, our top 3 referrers a week ago looked like:

1. Google natural search hits (organic)


2. Google AdSense Network click-throughs (advertising)


3. The CNET Blog, Alpha (public relations / word of mouth)

After John wrote about us, it became:

1. John Battelle's Search Blog (public relations / word of mouth)


2. Google natural search hits (organic)


3. Google AdSense Network click-throughs (advertising)

Now Connors Communications is a public relations firm and HitTail is a natural search tool. The one thing we don't provide as a professional service is advertising (though we provide strategic counsel). So to have a literal neck-to-neck race in a new endeavor this early in the race is symbolic, and probably of interest to the entire marketing world, which is what prompted me to do this post.

In all fairness, Advertising which slipped to position #3 can be pumped up simply by paying more, especially on the AdSense network with bloggers being HitTail's target audience. So, it's not fair to say that Advertising is least effective. We just are not paying much. It may be time to re-balance. Anyone with mutual funds split between different risk-level funds can see the relationship between financial diversification and diversification in the marketing mix. It's just healthier and can carry you through rough waters.

And rarely do you have the marketing numbers so clearly laid out in front of you that you could almost program automatic rebalancing in the marketing mix as you can with an investment portfolio. But here at Connors, we're considering doing exactly that. Should it be 1/3 organic, 1/3 word of mouth and 1/3 advertising? Depends on your budget. If you can afford it, make advertising set the bar and go for a 2/3 advertising, 1/6 organic, 1/6 word of mouth.

Advertising is the clearest deal in marketing. You put X-dollars in and get Y-circulation out. While there are strategic components to advertising, no doubt, it's a high stakes game, and a completely different discipline than the organic side of marketing, where the deals are not so clear. In both public relations and natural search (the organic side of marketing), there's no X-dollars in/Y-circulation out formula. It's fueled on pure strategy, creativity, and brilliant tactical execution. It costs a lot less, but the rewards can be much greater.

HitTail for instance, has been covered in CNET, Business Week, John Battelle's Search Blog and all over the Internet in forums and small business blogs. This exposure in terms of marketing dollars was out of the question for HitTail. Of course, the thing you're trying to promote needs to be sufficiently buzz-worthy raw material for organic marketing to work. Otherwise, self-fueling momentum (a required characteristic of organic marketing) can never set in.

You simply can't be your own biggest advocate forever. Eventually, you have to hand the torch over to your users, a certain portion of whom should be crazy-in-love with what you do. You can see this most clearly in Apple Macintosh zealots. But you can also see it starting to occur with HitTailers, who increasingly use terms like "the holy grail" of marketing, or "the next big thing". While we absolutely love this advocacy, we're the first to point out the healthy marketing mix referred to above.

OK, so Google organic search started #1 and slipped to #2 behind Search Blog. But what about the rest of the referrers?

The answer is that everything else added together is 2.1 times greater than the top 3 referrers added together. In other words, our top 3 referrers are 1/3 natural search, 1/3 paid ads and 1/3 non-paid link from the media. And collectively, they account for 1/3 of the overall referring sources to the HitTail website. And that 2/3 "everything else" component is mostly word-of-mouth, such as smaller blogs, social bookmarks like del.icio.us, with a smattering of second-tier search. Now, I don't consider Yahoo! second tier, but after only 4 months, HitTail isn't really driving natural search traffic in Yahoo anywhere near the level it does in Google.

Here are the lessons I believe should be taken away to people looking at ways to drive more potentially qualified traffic to their site.

1. If you have the money, paid advertising can drive the most traffic in the shortest period of time. You get what you pay for.


2. Also in the short-term, word of mouth (collectively) can be a bigger driver of traffic than natural search by a factor of 2/3.


3. Natural search is however actually effective in the short term. Google alone accounted for as much traffic as a CNET article for the same time period. Conversely, CNET drove as much traffic as all of Google.


4. The largest and lowest-cost driver of traffic seems to be coverage by thought leaders in your space who have a regular readership, such as John Battelle's search blog.

All of these are short-term take-aways, because 4 months is NOTHING in the scheme of things. As I've seen with the sites where the HitTail methodologies are developed, it's not unusual for natural search (from Google alone) to account for 80% of all traffic. It's just that this takes a long, slow build on the order of a year or more.

HitTail - As Described in BusinessWeek

Be sure to check out the September 25, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek (on newstands now) -- page 16. Building a Better Mousetrap

Resources to Learn About HitTail Before You Register

So, we're still not communicating quite as clearly as we could about what HitTail is. I received the feedback that we want you to sign up for HitTail without explaining much about what it does. I'm sure some of it is navigation and site design issues. I don't think we control the experience enough upon arrival at the site. But at any rate, here are a few of the things you can do to learn about HitTail before you even register...

• A 6-page sequence that gives the complete overview.
• An FAQ answering many additional questions.
• A blog with over a hundred posts delving into issues in some depth.
• A forum where we interactively field all questions or you can talk with other users.
• A demo.
• A guest login.
• Help screens built into every page, which you can get to with the guest login.

So you see, we are really trying to provide resources to allow people to understand what HitTail and long tail keyword optimization is all about before asking to make the committment of registering. What good is a registration if someone doesn't know yet whether they want to try it?

Seeing The Woman In Red with HitTail

What is your website trying to tell you? A new service from PR firm Connors Communications covered in this week's Business Week (p. 16, Building a Better Mousetrap) and in John Battelle's Search Blog last Friday tries to tell us. And if you state long enough, maybe you can see the Woman in Red.

(See the HitTail Widget over to the right of this post)

Have you ever found yourself asking what activity is going on on your website, but you've been disappointed by having to endure that day-long wait to find out what happened yesterday? If you have, then you may want to check out this service.

The same is true if any of your pages ever got Dugg and and you sat there wondering what activity was going on on your site. HitTail allows you to watch the real-time flow of clicks. Even non-techies can sit back watching the patterns and deriving meaning.

Quoting the Digg user and HitTailer, eConsultant:

A couple of my pages were on Digg yesterday and they had the HitTail code and the system captured data perfectly. The Search Hits tab was really moving like you how it in the YouTube movie!

HitTail filters out all the page-to-page clicks and multiple re-clicks from the same user, so what you have is an almost perfect view of uniques -- or the influx of genuine first time visitors. This gives you a pretty good idea in absolute terms how many people visited your site as a result of getting dugg.

You get the added benefit of seeing which searches are leading to your site as they happen. Ajax is used to give you that feeling that you always wanted to get by just loading your log file into a text editor. You know new activity is going on. You just can't see it because of the way text editors work. HitTail has acheived a unique real-time view where they're managing millions of records in an a responsive Ajax datagrid, with no data pre-processing to wait for as with most analytic software.

In addition to the real-time search hit view, the service mines those keywords for the best candidate topics for new blog posts as far as drawing in new traffic to your website through search. It does this by analyzing the hits that actually did occur, and picking out the ones that are likely to come up on the first page of results if turned into the headline of a blog post. At very least, it's greater insight into the search terms that are leading people to your site.

This is a process not only applicable to business blogs fishing for customers, but its also great political blogs, technology blogs, social causes and non-profits, or people simply trying to extend their influence on a topic. It's an extra little blogging edge.

We joke that it's like immersing yourself in the data flow, like The Matrix. But its surprisingly more true than you may think. Based on how we highlight the keywords to construct that "river of black" (or in this example, neon green) in your Search Hits tab (the referrer stream), it is eerily plausible to say you might get into the zone and see that woman in red.

And the best part is that you don't even have to be a techie to do it.

No wait! The best part is that it's free.

To help you really understand what's going on here, how it relates to the long tail concept, and how to get started HitTailing, the site has...

• A 6-page sequence that gives the complete overview.
• An FAQ answering many additional questions.
• A blog with over a hundred posts delving into issues in some depth.
• A forum where we interactively field all questions or you can talk with other users.
• A demo.
• A guest login.
• Help screens built into every page, which you can get to with the guest login.

Competitive Benchmark Keywords - The Slow Rise

This article is about the flip-side of HitTailing: boosting a large head instead of chasing a long tail. SEOs often talk about the hierarchy of keywords you need to target: a website-wide term, a website sub-area term (often for the directory), and a page-specific unique term. HitTail is about those page-specific unique terms. But it's also nice to get those coveted top-terms. I've done this over and over as an in-house Webmaster in past jobs, and these results tend to take a long time to produce, and have staying power of years (over a half-decade in at least two examples).

When I came onboard Connors 2 years ago, one of the responsibilities that landed on my plate was overhauling the website. I did that about 6 months into my stint. About 1 year later, we landed one of the coveted 2-word combos we sought: pr firm. Now, this isn't the windfall victory it may seem, because it's the singular-form of only ONE of the general ways to refer to our industry. And because everyone can see Connors' data through the HitTail guest login, you can see that as of the time of this writing, it only generated 100 (unique) search hits since I put the HitTail code on the tracking site in June.

In those months, the terms connors, connors communications and public relations case studies have all outperformed pr firm. But the fact remains, we've crept the first page of search on the term PR firm, and have inched our way over some of the largest PR firms in the industry. This illustrates several points...

1. You much choose these 2-word overarching keywords carefully. You won't get them if they're not closely aligned to what you really are and how people talk about you.


2. You have to be pretty committed to these words, because they may take years to conquer and you can't change your mind midstream.


3. The honest-to-goodness traffic really needs to already exist on these words to tap into. You're wasting your time if you choose a loser benchmark keyword. Google Trends is an invaluable tool in making this evaluation.


4. Even once achieving these words, they may not be your top producers. 3 or 4 word combos that are less-expected and more searched-on can still be the cash cows.


5. Even achieving your 2-word combo is not the end of the journey. You've only just plugged one "lead leak". There are many more equally valid ways referring to you. And then there are the singular and plural forms to think about.

So, my piece of advice on coveted benchmark keywords for the rapidly growing HitTail audience is to get your short-term satisfaction of achievement from the prescribed HitTailing process, but to always have this background task in your mind. Choose your one most-important 2-word combo that's challenging enough (and valuable enough according to Google Trends) to be worth pursuing, but not so challenging that you'll never achieve it. Add that keyword to your templates so it's automatically on every page in your site in many of the important elements, so you never have to consciously optimize for it again (on-site). Get that keyword in your Yahoo and other directory descriptions if you haven't already. And get ready for a long wait.

And as the final point, know where you'd like to be in an ideal world, and check your current status. Connors would like to be in the first page of results on the term public relations, but currently, we're buried on page 9 of results. This isn't the worst thing in the world, and not bad for a "boutique" PR agency. And there's virtually no way to HitTail such a competitive term onto the first page of results. It's a perfect example of where bringing out the heavy guns is required. Over time, we will probably bring ourselves to page 1 on the term public relations because of HitTail. Think about that PR strategy for a moment.

Public Relations and SEO - How Savvy is Savvy?

In my recent promotion of the HitTail service, a controversy ALMOST broke out regarding comment spam. I keep a close watch on everyone writing about the overlap of the long tail concept, public relations, search and marketing in general. When appropriate, I will join the discussion and occasionally mention HitTail. I usually do it very well, but on one occasion, my post was too brief, my mention of HitTail too blunt, and the company associated with the blog too easy to interpret as a competitor. They are a marketing firm that wrote a paper on chasing the long tail of search--I might add, a full two months after HitTail was identified by MarketShift as a tool that chases the long tail.

But posting comments where appropriate is only one tiny aspect of online PR, and should be approached with extreme caution. A much better approach is search, because it perfectly positions the PR firm as the invisible hands that you never knew were involved. Traditionally, this has meant that PR firms were often responsible for articles mentioning particular products, or TV shows that have guests from particular companies. Paul Graham, the programmer and investor of Yahoo! Store fame likens this to a submarine. And in fact, when you search on the term PR firm, there you will find Paul's article... and us, Connors Communications.

Commenting in other peoples' blogs and producing advantageous search results are two techniques of online PR. But there are more. Of course you have to monitor the online content closely. Many call this the blogosphere, but it includes all Web content, such as forums, news sites, and just plan old websites (no RSS feed). You also should proactively control the discussion by hosting your own blog and establishing your own unique voice and authority. The HitTail blog has only been out since January this year (technically, only since June if you factor in the domain change), and already we're being referred to as one of the go-to sites for SEO. And you should take advantage of social networking media, as we are with the YouTube viral video and most recently, Squidoo, which may be one o the best unsung PR 2.0 devices out there in how it lets you organize your view f the world and by virtue of simply doing that, attract and influence viewers who have similar interests through search.

And finally, if you do use an outside firm or agency such as Connors, it's important to look for a few key factors. There is SO MUCH online PR you can do for free if you have enough time and are willing to learn the tools, such as Technorati, HitTail, Squidoo, MySpace and the like that the agency should bring more value than merely using those tools on your behalf. Sure, there's strategic communication and helping you formulate your message. But there's so much more that's possible when you go to the pros.

Look for an agency that is so savvy that it is capable of revolutionizing the industry itself. Public relations by its very nature is unorthodox forms of marketing, and the state of technology and the media, there is unlimited opportunity for unorthodoxy. This prompted Connors first to delve into online outreach and search, but then to break out the sexiest piece and turn it into HitTail in an overture to the world, and a wonderful example of our capabilities.

Right along with having enough tech savvy to develop HitTail, we have the savvy to tie into any content management system instantly spin out hyper-search-friendly versions of your site, pretty much eliminating the need for paid inclusion services. These are very artistic (and scheduled) data-to-XML-to-HTML transformations that are about as cutting edge as it gets in the field of search engine optimization. And the best part here is that since its just advanced queries, when the search engines change, all you need to do is tweak the transformation instead of undertaking yet another scrap-and-rebuild. Even if you're undergoing a CMS deployment, this technique can be quickly activated on your old system today, so you get all that traffic in the meantime that you would otherwise be leaving on the table.

We're a PR firm that can discuss your Web strategies down to that level of detail. We have employees on staff who have programmed entire enterprise systems.

So, to wrap it up, sure there are the flesh-driven components of online outreach, such as blogging, commenting, and generally joining the online discussion. There are also the strategic communication bits, such as having a clear value proposition and getting your arguments down tight. But there are also the tech savvy components, such as app development and the ability to massively manipulate and transform data onto the information landscape. And if your PR firm isn't able to hold discussions at that level, they may not be competitive enough for the current business landscape.

Organic Search Overhauled by PR Firm?

So its time to set the record straight regarding HitTail versus the analytics packages with an organic search twist.

Right off the bat, we're free. Yes, we're free while in beta. But we're going to remain free even after beta, with certain stipulations. High traffic sites are going to have to pay, because we're not made of money after all. And compelling premium services will be offered over and above today's services. But at heart, we think the HitTailing process is for everyone.

Secondly, we're all about PROCESS--not data. We strive to offer a smooth, tight and seamless site optimization process that can't fall into the spam chasm. We want the HitTailing process to be sustainable, long-term and apply across all search engines. We want it to evolve with search itself. Our product development will reflect this--becoming less and less like a traffic monitoring tool, and more like a direct, straight-talking advisor and editor. Everything about HitTail seems to be counter-intuitive, and it is a mixed blessing--the definition of an early-adopter's product... but can it cross the chasm?

On the counter-intuitive topic, we couldn't care less about pretty pie charts and graphs that break down your traffic. In fact, we hardly even care about pulling the list of long tail of keywords! Yes, that's right, it's a big waste of time if you're not careful. Target terms that are working too well for you, and you're wasting your time. Target terms that are unlikely to ever be searched on again and you're wasting your time. In between lays the sweet spot, and the reason for HitTail's existence. We'd prefer to show you nothing but the Suggestions tab if we could--but that would deprive folks of their Search Hits tab addiction.

So, what makes HitTail different is in how WE pare down that massively long lists so you don't have to. Consequently, my earlier posts about how HitTail primarily saves time. It's a nuance that will be difficult to get across to the mainstream until the groundswell of early adopters are reaping all the benefit, making the old-schoolers squirm and start to question what's going on. But that's just the nature of change.

One of our objectives is to blatantly remove the paralysis through analysis that plagues the performancing tool landscape today. Bottom line: HitTail is for marketers who live busy lives and don't want to be left off the organic search bandwagon. And that's why the overhauling of the intimidating field of natural search optimization is quite probably coming from a PR firm. Getting across these subtle but important points is as much a matter of effective communication as it is building a better mouse trap.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

PhD Bases Business in Part on HitTail

In my last post, I covered vocal HitTail advocate, Gary Beal who uses the service for optimizing his million-dollar paid keyword campaigns. In this post, I'm switching gears to discuss an equally vocal advocate on the organic search side, David Stockwell, who happens to be a Ph.D. at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UCSB and San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. His bio reads:

David Stockwell PhD is a well published scientist who has developed statistical software to help researchers make outstanding contributions in biodiversity such as managing and discovering new species. Founder of NicheShape, he is now helping corporate world to manage and discover new clients.

And he also happens to be basing his business in part on HitTail.

That's not to say that David is unique in this respect. Fathom from CoopyRite is also disclosing this is part of his methods, and we believe a large array of SEO and online marketing firms are already following suit. David is just the most highly pedigreed and vocal. We also like the subject-matter of his HitTailing, and the thought that our tool is being used for social good beyond raising the bottom line.

Anyway, David's NicheShape.com website is full of information about what he's doing. But the post that probably gets most to the point of what he's doing is this one about dominating niche concepts in search. A lively discussion broke out in our forum where prolific SEO forum participant Randall McCarley of Web Development & Promotion made the point that HitTail suggestions should be carefully evaluated and measured against your site's objectives. Dave countered with one of the most interesting replies I ever saw:

"Thanks I can understand your strategy but I am a HitTail slave. It sends me suggestions and I just provide content. Niche Modeling deals with the distributional statistics of any field, like the latest long tail trend, and I am just going where HitTail takes me. Where it will end up, nobody knows."

David is a wonderful example of HitTail being used to generate revenue directly for himself through people advertising on HIS websites, and using the same techniques to provide writing for clients. He boldly states that not all content is created equal, and that for a small fee, he will deliver a short article that will provide that special edge in about a week.

Now in the field of SEO, we've got a lot of unsubstantiated claims being made. Often the evidence exists of SEO's effectiveness, but the excuse is provided that it's proprietary client information or competitive secrets are involved. One of the many things that strike me about David is the Ph.D. and the increasing amount of statistical analysis diagrams he's rolling out to substantiate his claims. Much like Gary Beal who went public with screenshots of HitTail-supercharged AdWords campaigns risking fostering his own competition, David Stockwell spells out his methodology, specific tools that he uses and actual data evidence that its working.

Such generosity is in itself an artifact of the long tail effect. Given enough people using a competitive new methodology to come along, the laws of probability states that you're going to have at least a couple who come forward in a substantially altruistic fashion and spell it all out for the rest of us.

HitTail Saved Client $90,000

Thank you, Gary Beal! From HitTail first hitting beta, we've had a strong advocate in Gary Beal, a.k.a. GaryTheScubaGuy in the SEO forums. And more important than his advocacy is what he taught us about the role of natural search terms in pay-per-click campaigns. There is some speculation about WHY this effect occurs, but thanks to Gary's recently published AdWord campaign management screens, we have hard-and-fast evidence that it DOES occur. AdWord campaigns get better with a list of terms known to be effective in natural search, such as the Excel lists you can export from HitTail.

I'm getting tired of everything about HitTail being counter-intuitive and requiring gobs of explanation. Indeed, I don't think it would even have been possible a few years ago, without people like Gary and the blogging masses repeating the counter-intuitive message, assuring everyone it's true. Off-the-beaten-track keywords are just what you need for paid keyword campaigns.

Instead of delving into the near-conspiracy theory of Google paid and organic click-through tracking systems cross-validating each other, I'll stick to what we know for a fact. We know for a fact that the HitTail keyword lists exclusively resulted from actual search click-through. Further, we know that HitTail keywords under the Suggestions tab are NOT appearing on the first page of results. So, it stands to reason that if you take semi-obscure terms that are producing natural search hits when you're determined enough to dig for them and pay, you are suddenly catapulting your ads right in front of the most potentially qualified prospects.

That's a fact.

I get the feeling that Gary gets even more frustrated than we do about people "not getting it." He's provided us with screenshots of his campaign management screens in the past, and totally made us understand. But we've never felt free to use those screens, and so we're delighted with the post he just made at Distinct SEO's site. Now the world can see the same validation of this less-spoken-about, but equally significant aspect of HitTailing: optimization of paid keyword campaigns.

In particular, the key facts to notice is that the total number of impressions went up while the cost-per-click went down. This is the ideal: reaching more people and paying less for their visits. Philosophically, Google wants to reward relevant ads that worked and gave people what they were looking for. That's why total impressions can skyrocket at the same time as what you pay for the click-throughs can drop. And that's what using HitTail data in AdWord campaigns can acheive.

Gary further goes on to explain that using this technique can result in your click-through-ratio dropping--but this is only natural considering your impressions increased massively. In other words, the size of your sales funnel has dramatically increased and more people are potentially aware of you as a result of your marketing efforts (more impressions). And although fewer of them click on those impressions, you're dealing with many more overall people, so the total absolute number of click-throughs (prospects) goes up.

So, what about conversions? Of those who DO click through, what percentage of them are likely to buy? Is HitTail just attracting more traffic from bad prospects? Gary says no. The total number of visitors in absolute terms goes up AND the conversion rate goes up (in the example that Gary provided, by 58%). The final rub is that the cost of getting those clicks went down by 69%!

It's no wonder that Gary has been such a fierce advocate and determined to educate us and the rest of the world about the paid-search properties of HitTail. He should be commended for the considerable generosity of publishing screen shots of his HitTail-optimized AdSense campaigns. Being in a position where he manages several million dollars (pounds) of advertising revenue, Gary certainly had competitive reasons NOT to share this information.

Squidoo, PR and Natural Search

So, it took me awhile to understand Squidoo when I first heard of it, but it factors into natural search in a serious way. When Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail was first released, I was very interested in what sites were coming up high on the term long tail. We were on search result pages 4 and 8, depending on whether you used a space or not. That was pretty darn good considering the bloggy buzzwordy nature of the term by then, but Chris had THREE entries on the first page of Google results: Wired and his TypePad site being two of them. The third was his Squidoo lens page, so I paid attention.

Squidoo simply lets you edit a page together much like using any Web-based content management system like blogging software or MySpace, but there's no design involved, and they have all these ready-made modules that let you incorporate data from all over the place, like Technorati, eBay, Flickr or wherever. The end result is creating a page that shows the world some topic the way you see it. It's like taking the 20 sites you may check in the course of the day pursuing your obsessions and tying it together into one page and showing it to the world. And of course, HitTail is my obsession.

So, I signed up as a Squidoo lensmaster, and started putting my page together. I stared with the most important links and blog posts about HitTail, which I'd like to direct the world into. Then I added a Technorati search for HitTail, the HitTail blog datafeed, the YouTube demo video, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and now I'm thinking about what else should go in there.

I'm thinking I might categorize the links. There are so many types of HitTail links: ones that cover the controversy (are we making yet another a spam tool?), the most insightful ones that describe what we're doing better than we ourselves have like BuildABetterBlog, the most vocal HitTailing advocates like Gary Beal and David Stockwell, PhD, the mainstream press like CNET and John Battelle's Search Blog, the tech-savvy public relations firm angle, and more.

I'd like to start using Flickr to keep the most key diagrams in explaining how HitTail works and why. Then, I could use Squidoo to wrap in these pictures. It's a really excellent example of the spirit of Web 2.0, tying together features of products all over the Web and making it your own. But unlike so many search-unfriendly Web 2.0 tools that hide all the content using terrible Web addresses and AJAX data loads, Squidoo uses well optimized pages--which you can confirm by doing a "View Source" on the page.

So whereas some PR firms are considering monitoring the blogsphere with Technorati and Google alerts the beginning and ending of PR 2.0, Connors advocates (and practices) jumping right into the online world head-first using some of the most sophisticated methods possible: constructing pages that not only alert YOU to new news regarding your obsession, but doing so in a search-optimized way that potentially makes your entire audience able to view the world through your eyes as well.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

Chasing The Long Tail of Natural Search

This blog post gets back to the HitTail basics, and how it lets anyone systematically target the long tail of natural search. And in this case, "anyone", is the typical marketer, uninitiated to the arcane world of search engine optimization (SEO). HitTail is a way of using blogging software to immediately start capturing more of the natural traffic that is rightfully yours.

HitTail accomplishes this by cutting right to the heart of the matter, and telling you exactly what to write about, using sophisticated algorithms that "know" these topics are bound to do well for you in natural search. 99% of what's presented to you in analytics software is off the point. Assuming you already have a site capable of making the sale, all you need to know is what topics to target. And that's what HitTail tells you.

You can listen to long-winded seminars about targeting the long tail of natural search. But the essential problem is that when you pull your "long list" of keywords--a list that can be pulled from any healthy site--the challenge is in knowing which of these 10,000+ words to target. If you choose things you're already doing well on, you're wasting your time. If you choose things that are wholly unique one-time hits (no matter what you do), you're wasting your time. It's about zeroing in on that sweet spot, where you're right on the edge of performing well on terms that will produce recurring traffic.

And thanks to the way blogging software works, you have effectively targeted the topic after you create your headline. The rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing. And hopefully, HitTailers will take advantage of the fact. We're trying to encourage good habits, writing what will be most valuable to your readers, and just incidentally pulling in that readership through natural search.

Recently, Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts accused me of comment spam when I tried to let him know about HitTail. His post was headlined "Chasing the Long Tail of Natural Search". Now anyone who knows me and my work in this area probably knows my complete sincerity when I try to spread the word about HitTail. This should be conveyed in great part in how we're making it a free service, which will remain free even after beta.

I'd like Stephan to know that I don't begrudge his accusation, and can understand the knee-jerk reaction to a comment post when "PR firm" is connected to it. Controversy abounds surrounding the role of PR online, and some folks just love to jump on the bandwagon thinking they caught a PR firm "astroturfing" on behalf of their clients. Of course in this case, HitTail isn't so much a client of Connors so much as a direct creation of mine. And yes, I guess I do like to let people know about it--especially people who write about (and host Webinars on) chasing the long tail of natural search...

...exactly the thing our tool is designed to let you do in the most efficient manner possible.

Is Blogging Software CMS? Which Best for HitTail?

In our forum, "Dan The Man 101" asks a blogging software question, and our answer is suitable for a blog post, so here it is:

"I want to build complete sites with CMS - content management software... which blogging software is by definition...

Is it an acceptable practice to use blogging software to do this, and if so, which software would you recommend, wordpress, blogger, etc?"

Excellent question, Dan. Yes, blogging software is CMS, though hard core CMS people would argue against that because of a blog's very narrow definition of "content", and strictly enforced journal-like presentation.

Anyway, that aside, yes, using blog software will prepare you nicely even if you were to upgrade to something bigger in the future. And even then, there are at least 2 radically different interpretations of CMS: Web-publishing CMS vs. enterprise CMS. The Web is full of open source web publishing CMS systems, but spare yourself some pain by going right to blogging software to get some practice in.

Of the blogging choices, it comes down to whether you want to go the easy route and lose some control, or have ultimate control and lose simplicity. For ease (and suitability for quick HitTailing results), we recommend Blogger. The reason is that even if you host the site yourself, you can have Blogger transmit the files into location on your site. It's sort of a hybrid of hosting and not hosting your own blog, and turns out to be highly suitable for HitTail.

If you want to go the ultimate control route, then we suggest either Movable Type or WordPress. When last I checked, WordPress was totally free, while Movable Type has some nominal fee. With both of these, you host everything yourself, meaning you have to install it on a server, deal with configuration and a lot of other technical details. But it gives you greater control down the road if you want to do more advanced CMS-like things and customizations.

Both SixApart (the makers of Movable Type) and WordPress have "hosted" versions of their blog. SixApart's hosted version is called TypePad. A lot of people love TypePad, and the only downside is that it's tough to "mix" your blog with an existing site. It's either on the TypePad domain, or on its own dedicated domain that doesn't intermix with an existing site. It's a workable approach, but it's a wee bit harder to install the code until we make a TypePad widget.

And finally, the one choice we don't think is workable right now is the hosted version of WordPress, because it stops JavaScript from being used. They're quite nervous right now about the JavaScript worm that hit MySpace in a big way, and they rightfully feel that any support of JavaScript creates vulnerabilities. The downside is you can't install HitTail and most other tracking code on the hosted version of WordPress.

There are other blogging software packages out there, many in Open Source land. And we want to support every one, but it needs to support search-friendly URLs and not those "?id=number" parameters, which many still use.