Public Relations Firm on the Move

As many HitTailers know from watching our demos, HitTail was incubated within Connors Communications, the high profile public relations company that launched Amazon.com, Priceline and others. Connors was there during the birth of the pay-per-click industry as the PR firm for GoTo.com in the beginning. Most recently, we brought Vonage up to the point of going public, and we are always on the lookout for the next breakout technology that needs that special touch. With HitTail, we're pretty much demonstrating that we're one of those rare PR firms that "gets it". Online outreach is not about flogging or splogging. It's not about social bookmark spamming or Digg kabals. And it's not about gratuitous comment-spam--even though yours truly has been accused of that on occasion.

Instead, online public relations is precisely about what traditional public relations is about--influencing the influencers through long-established and well nurtured relationships. Journalists and writers need things to write about, and PR professionals are often one of the best sources, especially in the field of technology where product development in and of itself is justifiably newsworthy. Think artificial diamonds, electronic paper, voice recognition, and the like. These things transform our world, are company announcements, and are simultaneously newsworthy in the truest sense of the word. These are the companies that Connors looks for.

But Connors Communications is also a search engine optimization firm that is attempting to mainstream natural search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, due to the ever-shifting and necessarily secret nature of search algorithms, the secrets are no sooner "cracked" than spammed into oblivion, thereby ruining it for everyone. Today's hot tips are tomorrow's penalties, and the arms-race continues. Spammers and affiliate marketers can pull out all stops in their SEO endeavors, because when the search engines catch on and ban the sites, they just move on to new throw-away domains on new hosts. When folks adept at these affiliate strategies try to bring their know-how to mainstream business, they are liable to cause more damage than good, because these strategies cannot be safely applied to indispensable domains. I'm not saying all SEO's are snake oil salesman. Quite to the contrary, those who truly understand SEO and think like Google engineers are worth their weight in gold. But how can you tell the good from the bad?

Connors is often asked how our approach to SEO is different, safe and effective in the long term. In fact, continually explaining it indirectly led to us developing the HitTail product. Recently, I was asked to put a few paragraphs together on this very topic, and thought I would share them as the second half of this blog post:

The desire to be on that first page of search fuels the stellar success of Google's paid-search product, AdWords, forcing marketers to participate in ever-larger and more competitive pay-per-click campaigns. But of course the real desire is to be on the first page of the free and un-paid results ahead of your competitors, making natural search engine optimization the elephant in the room of any online marketing discussion.

The process goes something like this: an executive or other high level officer goes to Google, performs a search, and upon noticing that their company is nowhere to be found, asks who is responsible, and it automatically falls into the court of Marketing. The marketing person does research, discovers that simply by paying money to Google, you can get onto the first page of results, albeit through the sponsored listings in the margins. But it's an instant fix, a fair deal, and satisfies the higher ups. And even though the campaign cost begins to get driven up through competition, it still appears worth the cost because the results are uniquely trackable. But the seed of natural search envy has been planted.

As a result, research continues into natural search, and the marketing people discover the shadowy world of search engine optimization (SEO) where conflicting information abounds. Before long, you get the feeling you're talking to snake oil salesmen. So, how do you get the benefit of natural search engine dominance while steering clear of charlatans?

The answer is to take an approach that combines low-risk and proven methods that are approved by the search engine companies themselves with an aggressive campaign of high-quality content publishing. Publishing this continual flow of high-quality content simultaneously solves any company's need for both a blogging and natural search strategy. Because the search engines are continually "stimulated" by the new content that adheres to search engine best practices, the content continually gets served up in search results. Over time, this consistent process builds momentum and snowballs the size of the site and visitors resulting from search. Eventually, the site can achieve market dominance, meaning that any prospective customers within your space are actually more likely to encounter you than not in the course of their research.

Taking this approach begins with a website audit, ensuring that your website adheres to the best practices known to hold enormous sway in the search engine algorithms of today. Following that, we establish a low-friction method of pushing out new high-quality content for your website. This can be in the form of a blog, an online newsletter, or even website content proper. Our on-writers, once familiar with your market, product and voice, begin pushing out new content, initiating the habit of frequent, low-friction publishing. Topics are chosen using our patent-pending HitTail technology, and the process continues through the term of the agreement. Once an agreement has expired, the benefits persist, unlike a paid advertising campaign, and the client has the option of stepping in to continue the regimen of persistent search-savvy publishing.

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

Keyword Tools Useless for Long Tail

Sorry for the lack of blog posts. I'll try to get back into the swing of things. Meanwhile, here's another longtail keyword article that voices the need for HitTail better than I ever could have...

Today's keyword research tools are simply worthless for finding long tail phrases that have search value.

I have this list of keywords I just wanted to run through an analysis
tool to tell me which words were the best performing on raw search data.

I don't care about competition, duh, because I am looking for long
tail. (i.e. no competition. Not anyone that I have to worry about anyway.)

Everyone and their sister is writing about "internet marketing" in my
niche because of keyword tools, even Google's, being so out of touch with
today's publishers' ranking needs.

All you get back from all the keyword tools is silly, nonsense phrases
that are all mixed up if they are 3-5 words, or simple two word phrases that
everyone goes after.

TechCrunch Party in New York City

The TechCrunch party at the Bed nightclub in NYC was a great success for us. Michael Arrington knows how to throw a party. We took pictures the entire night, and are particularly fond of this one of Connie Connors with her crew. Check out the rest of the TechCrunch Meetup #8 party pictures here.

And here we are with Michael Arrington, the Party's gracious host and power broker of Silicon Valley.

Long Tail Keywords Convert Better

I wish I wrote this article:

Many web marketers see paid search marketing as the fastest way to bring traffic to their online shops. At the first glance the pay-per-click scheme looks easy: you bid on a keyword, higher bids get higher positions (Overture), and web users see your listing among the top results for your target keyword. You dont have to invest into search engine optimization and link building; you pay for your visitors and hope to quickly get targeted traffic. But did you notice that more and more often you have to raise bids above the threshold of profitability in order to put your listings to the top of paid search results? With money you spend for PPC exceeding your revenues is it worth to do online business at all? Well, it is time to seriously consider promoting your website in natural (organic) search results.

New Longtail-based Metric for Measuring Website Health

Some of you have read in the TechCrunch article about our new "change-over-time" longtail diagram. It's located under the "My HitTail" tab, and I encourage you to go take a look. Fair warning: you won't see much unless your site has been using HitTail for a couple of months, and it's a really great way to see how well you're HitTailing.


While this feature may become part of the premium services, we're letting everyone have a peek at the new site-health metric that we hope will sweep the Internet. It's based on the premise that your site is only healthy if both the number of hits on your top terms is continually increasing, while simultaneously the diversity of keywords leading to your site is expanding.

In other words, you need to see growth in both the head and the tail.

And now, you can not only get these figures from HitTail, but you can see it occur animated over time by grabbing a slider. The more months you've been HitTailing, the more change you should see month-to-month. If you see no change, something's not right. Either you're not adding content using our suggestions, or you're using a bad content management or blogging system. So far, with virtually no effort, the Connors site (very infrequent blogging and content change) sees an average 20% growth in both the head and tail.

This is a totally new metric on the Internet for how well your site is doing. Check it out.

The Cobbler's Children Have Shoes

So, HitTail was just covered by TechCrunch. That's pretty awesome, and is one of the big hits people go for these days in the technology influencer space. Michael Arrington was just covered by the Wall Street Journal as Silicon Valley's newest power broker.

I can definitely say that as an intrepreneur at Connors Communications PR firm in NYC, I am not a victim of "the cobbler's children have no shoes" syndrome. We are already being contacted by other firms, VCs and potential clients asking how we got the coverage. Yes, we are sponsoring the NY party (and we hope to see you there), but our product has also been undergoing impressive "organic" growth for months now, without the benefit of this coverage. The purpose of this blog post is in part to take a snapshot of the Alexa-measured pre-crunch traffic levels.

We're already in the Alexa top-10,000 sites, but I expect this coverage will have a huge impact. Why? When you look at sites that have been crunched, but have NOT had the equivalent organic growth, you have a case of isolated TechCrunch influence. It's big, but this is a sobering reminder of what happens when you get the exposure when you're not ready.

I am so glad we handled HitTail as an open beta program for several months before the big publicity push. It gave us a chance to improve the product, get a feel for the market and experience some gradual organic growth, which is always nice from an IT-perspective. It's a great example of how you can integrate your marketing efforts right alongside agile software development so that by the time you're ready to open the curtains, you've already got momentum.

For anyone with a product who is up to the point of looking for exposure through public relations or other methods, consider engaging Connors Communications in a dialogue. We are rapidly becoming one of our own best case studies.

StomperNet - What Does HitTail Record?

A site called StomperNet has recently been sending a boatload of people my way, and when I went to investigate, I discovered a website run by Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon, two old salts from the SEO community. It looks like their thing these days is seminars and a forum about building and promoting websites. They graciously granted me access to the forum to see the HitTail discussion, where I once again encountered none other than Dave Taylor singing our praises. Let me reiterate my thanks to Dave as a major advocate, and thanks to the StomperNet community. Anyway, this post is mostly about sharing some of my answers that I provided in those forums with the whole world.

> I am trying to figure out - is this much different from the info you can get from Google Analytics?

There's a few things that make HitTail's keyword list different. I could probably write forever on it, since it is very philosophical. Specifically, if keywords are not deemed to be valuable sources of suggestions, then we don't record it. But in a nutshell...

1. HitTail records fewer or different keywords than Google Analytics because HitTail only records the first hit of a session. This has the result of filtering out all the search, click, search, click activity that come from both the site owner doing tests and competitors (you know what I mean). This makes HitTail keyword lists a truer picture of the real keyword "life" of a website.

2. HitTail only records each keyword from each source once. Therefore, once it records "blue widgets" from www.google.com, it will never record it again. It may record it from Google India or Sweden--but not .com. This results in a keyword radar system where everything shown is a new and important event on your website, and the overall keyword activity on your site appears to go down. If you see a new keyword appear, it's the first time it EVER led to your site since you turned on tracking. This makes HitTail's signal to noise ratio excellent.

3. If a keyword doesn't look like it's going to be useful for finding new "pay-dirt" terms, then HitTail doesn't record it at all. This includes very long phrases, like with 7+ words. The likelihood of such an exact phrase occurring again is negligible, and certainly nothing you would like to optimize on. Similarly, if the keyword is too short (competitive), like one word, HitTail won't record it.

So there you have it. HitTail doesn't attempt to record everything, but instead tries to distill it down to just what's most important for optimization in a way that "gets into the minds" of your genuine prospective customers and audience.