How To Get More Traffic to Your Website

There was a Digg article today about the decision-making process for deciding whether to upgrade to Windows Vista. It reminded me exactly how effective a flow-chart can be in helping you decide a course of action—in this case, how to drive more free natural search traffic to your website. So, I took a few minutes to throw together the flowchart of how to get more traffic to your website using HitTail. This chart should have been there since day one. I'll ask my team to pretty-it-up and work it into the site more appropriately.

With the Overture Keyword Inventory tool imploding, people are going to be increasingly researching keyword tools to fill the vacuum—so, the time is right for this chart. Happy keyword hunting and traffic building!

Update: This has been turned into a formal How to HitTail flowchart.

Keyword Tool makes 2007 the Year of Natural Search

A tremendously interesting post appeared on our forum casting HitTail as the heir apparent to the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Wow, we are flattered. Dr. Howell goes on to state "That kinda relevance is what made Goggle the giant it is today."

That leads me to ask: how does HitTail fit into the greater state of the search industry?

Now, I don't usually comment on the financial state of search in the HitTail blog, but it's required as to speculate how HitTail fits into the big picture.

The pay-per-click part of the search industry is in fluctuation for various reasons. The annual nearly doubling of the paid search market is reportedly slowing down. The nearly 50/50 split between the share of this market is reportedly skewing towards Google. This combines to put the squeeze on Yahoo, which despite being beat on by Wall Street in recent months, has beat their expectations for fourth quarter earnings.

Marketing people deciding what to do with their budgets is causing the fluctuation, and the result is a lot of investment money deciding where to go. Is Google now the only keyword game in town? Is Overture obsolete, and did Yahoo make a mistake re-labeling it Yahoo Search Marketing, and disallowing the bidding on "under-the-traffic-threshold" long-tail keywords for years? Is this a giant recalibration of marketing budgets in light of marketing finally understanding this "series of tubes" thing we call the Internet?

Yes. That's it, exactly. Keep in mind: marketing people are recalibrating budgets. Now bear with me while I go through another paragraph of exposition.

In manufacturing, there's something known as the value chain. The value chain is where raw component materials acquire more value as they go through the manufacturing process, until they're worth significantly more to the end customer than the raw materials that went into them. Google's value chain is the considerable traffic that they arbitrate. And it's completely built on the good will of its users. If the users decide to stop searching in Google, then Google's product, their traffic, looses its value. So, Google must keep this traffic, and tends to do so by keeping their product simple (thus appealing to the mainstream), and the results relevant (thus keeping people from investigating other search options). And relevancy is maintained by not insisting that EVERYONE pay to be in Google's search results.

Therefore, Google has a need for pages that should be rewarded in their natural search results. Google is striving to reward SOMEONE based on SOME criteria. This will continue. The demand for natural search results is assured.

This whole discussion of the value chain is necessary in order to demonstrate why natural search listings have a long-term future. Otherwise, Internet search becomes like the Yellow Pages, but without the free listing—a big book of advertisements. Natural search results are not going away, because they are a necessary part of the manufacturing process that adds value. You might even say that natural results are Google's most important ingredient in their value chain.

HitTail is big, because it is the path for just about any marketing Joe to conquer their own little piece of natural search turf. This is increasingly being called "niche marketing", based on the premise that doing well in a niche is easier and quicker than doing well in an already crowded market. This tackle-the-niche concept applies to keywords as it does with economic markets. HitTail is just about the only formularized way to go about tackling natural search, in a sustainable, long-term fashion. So, HitTail is potentially big. HitTail is, in the terms of Geoffrey Moore, in the path of the tornado. HitTail is, in the terms of Malcolm Gladwell, at the tipping point. In the terms of Chris Anderson, HitTail is the first long-tail keyword marketing tool targeting the new shape of business.

We're ramping up to sustain the increased traffic as the collective marketing wisdom settles upon the fact that 2007 is the year of natural search. We know this is going to happen, because when you go researching longtail keyword tools, or any such concept, all paths lead back to us.

Yes, we practice what we preach, and look forward to becoming one of our own best success stories.

The Fastest Blog Monitoring Tool?

In the past, I've mentioned "the other side of SEO", involving spreading the word faster than search alone can provide. Thanks to tools like Technorati and Google Blog Search, no blog-post is an island. This has elevated blogging up to the role that doing submits used to occupy in SEO. Every blog post sets off a flare, lights up a beacon, signaling ambush-hunter news crawlers to pounce upon the site, grab a blurb off of the data feed, and bring it back to it's baby—the parent site (so it can be found by subsequent searchers). But even that process is oh-so-slow in this new instant-everything world of ours.

As a compulsive, nearly OCD, blog-monitoring fanatic, I see posts as fast as these predatory crawlers allow, as Alex Pooley mentions in his observations about my monkey-comment. So, that's a case where today's tools worked. But also as an active blogger, I see the time-lapse, and even the oversights, of these blog monitoring tools. I, like so many others, use Technorati because it was first, is quite good, and has developed a sort of loyalty in me. They provide XML-feeds that I can subscribe to on my mobile phone, and they include many things. Monitoring through Technorati is a good application of the 80/20 rule (80% of the benefit from the first 20% of the effort). And it making me fancy myself as "technorati" doesn't hurt.

But to fill in the remaining 20%, I'm always ferreting out what's new. I want faster. I want better. I want my posts to show up in their monitoring tools as fast as I hit the submit button from Blogger. Of course, that leads us to consider blogsearch.google.com, which I also use regularly. And there's a newcomer on the scene, named Sphere, which appears to be also be picking up blog-like pages that are not actually blogs, making it the most unique results of the three, and filling in some of that remaining 20%.

Of course, there's unlimited blog monitoring tools, like Ask, BlogPulse, Feedster, and the rest. Problem is, the all (most?) work off of the same ping-alert-systems. What one blog search engine knows, they all know. And what one doesn't know, none of them know. And therein lies the problem. That's a lot more than anyone cares to acknowledge. Unbeknownst to most, there is an invisible blogosphere—one comprised of Xanga, MySpace, FaceBook, and many other blogging systems that don't ping the Yahoo-owned blo.gs or the Google-friendly, Verisign-owned WebLogs (not to be confused with the once-Jason Calacanis-owned Weblogs, Inc,).

But for the invisible blogoshpere to be included, one of two things must happen. Either these pinging services must be smarter about harvesting up the new-blog-post alerts, or these ambush-crawlers must take their cues from something smarter than these pinging services. Both tasks are difficult, because it's a chicken-and-egg situation—complicated even more by the login gates of social networking sites such as MySpace and Xanga. Crawlers must not only know that a new post has been made, but they must have sufficient permission to get to the data.

Anyway, this leaves a big hole and wonderful opportunity for some new startup because the value of a truly real-time blog monitoring tool has never been clearer. It's the other half of the successful website formula (with mainstream search-influence being the first half). You must be in it for the slow, steady burn with traditional SEO, and the gradually growing snowball of traffic that comes from persistent blogging—even if you think your blog is an island. But then, there's the spiky acceleration of traffic that you can garner from your friends and fans in the blogosphere—if only you could know everything. In that spirit, I'm always on the lookout for the fastest blog monitoring tool. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Are you listening?

Paralysis Through Analysis? HitTail Sets You Free

Are you suffering from analytics exhaustion? Do you dread logging in in the morning and making sense of all those charts and graphs—only to realize that the data is already a day old? Do you want to just have your finger on the pulse of your site right now, at this moment? Are you dying to watch your log files in a way that makes sense to you? Then HitTail is for you.

It's been said by our own users that it couldn't be easier to install HitTail on your site. You just register and put a snippet of code in your blog or CMS template, and voila! You'll be able to see data about your site right away. No waiting a day for the reports to be generated. If a search hit occurs seconds after installing the code, you'll see it. So not only does HitTail alleviate analytics frustration, give you a the pulse of your site as-of-the-moment, but it also is a really great source of instant gratification.

We're not putting down analytics software. Quite the contrary, we're big believers in it for complex sites that have business tasks and objectives. But for the average blogger, or even the average marketing person who just wants to see how active a site is, we think HitTail is a breath of fresh air. We're filling a vacuum that was long left empty due to incorrect notions that running reports and offering back useful information takes a day.

More and more, bloggers and website owners are turning to HitTail as the one thing to run in addition to Google Analytics. Indeed, one of the most influential advisors in the blogosphere, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, made HitTail point #11 in the ways to market your blog in 2007 (I'm glad it wasn't a top-10 list). Thanks, Darren. We certainly see it as a supplement to analytics, and on occasions where the website publisher is just trying to grow their natural search traffic, an alternative approach that can stand on its own.

Anyone trying to get their own articles onto the Digg homepage should use HitTail, because it's going to tell you how you're doing, even if you don't start getting dugg up. You'll see all the visitors. Same applies to anyone trying to get found through StumbleUpon. All that traffic is coming to your site, but it's invisible to you—or you can't see it until the next day, by the time it's already too late to take real-time action to bolster your standings. Don't believe me? Check out Peter, the Affiliate's, comment on this blog post.

So, if you're feeling a little worn, and not too anxious to log into that analytics dashboard, take a break, take a deep breath, and plunge into HitTail. Submerge yourself into that real-time dataflow that is like watching the Matrix. Enjoy the fact that the average marketing Jane or Joe can be part of the in-crowd and do the in-thing, without devoting weeks to learning complicated technical jargon or interfaces. Remember when Google came out, and it seemed strange how simple it was? Where were all the portal-schmortal features that weighed down sites like AltaVista? Yet somehow, it was just right. That's HitTail. In the words of Peter, watch the demo video, and you'll just get it. And you'll realize you should have installed that free tracking code weeks ago.

Keywords in Your Crystal Ball

In my current SEO consulting engagement, the topic of the long tail occasional rears it's head (swings its tail), and the question ultimately comes around to whether or not the pursuit of the drips and drabs of traffic in the long tail are worth it. I always answer that it comes down to how efficiently you can focus on the long tail. If you don't have a good strategy, that way lies ruin, because there's just so much junk in the tail. If you put out a page on every obscure multi-word term, you're just going to trash up your website to turn one serendipitous hit into two.

So, you focus on things that are producing hits for you already, right? Uh, not quite. If a term is already working for you (i.e. coming up in the first page of search), then it's a waste of your time to focus more energy on that same term. It goes into the "done" bin. It's time to focus on more obscure terms. What about the most obscure? Uh, nope. If you do that, you're in the "turn one hit into two" arena, and no one wants to be there. The idea is to turn one hit into thousands. You want to tap into undiscovered veins of traffic gold.

OK, so you can discount terms that are working too well for you. And you can discount terms that are unlikely to ever work again for you, using indicators such as number of words and semantic pattern matching. You basically clip off the top and bottom of the list, leaving the sweet spot in the middle. Just how big is this sweet spot, and how much time have you saved?

Well, we adjust our thresholds so that we issue just the right amount of lucrative spot-on terms to our HitTail users. But in general, it equals about 5% of the overall keyword list. And keep in mind, a HitTail keyword list is already heavily filtered with philosophical goodness, in order to keep bad data out—such as keyword-stuffing by your competitors, and even your own search-and-click competitive benchmarking. Yep, we filter the clicks out that skew the data, making our remaining 5% of writing suggestions more like 1% of the gigantic keyword list that you're probably dealing with today when you pull it out of your analytics package.

But it doesn't stop there. HitTail only ever records every keyword that leads to your site from each source once. That's right—so, if "blue widgets" led to your site from www.google.com, we're never going to record it again (from that source), so our keyword tab works more like a radar system for historic events in the life of your website. Every keyword that appears under the keyword tab is celebrating it's birthday as a referring source to your site, making the HitTail keyword list all the more insightful and fascinating to watch.

But perhaps the most addictive aspect of HitTail is the infamously impossible Ajax real-time search hits. Sure, it's not really real-time, with a few second delay. But at last you can do what everyone intuitively thinks they should be able to do when they look at their log file: watch the real-time flow of visitors as they arrive. Once again, our magical patented filtering is at play here, ensuring that every entry under the Search Hits tab represents just one user. So, if you have 10 hits in an hour, that's an influx rate of 10 people per hour. Don't you wish all analytics were that simple? It's the sort of "pulse" of the website that today's generation of "wait 'till tomorrow" analytics software isolates you from.

So, we get back to the original question, of whether it's worth chasing the long tail of natural search? Yes, so long as you have a sane approach to zeroing in on the most worthwhile terms. It's like if you had a crystal ball looking at all the terms that MIGHT produce well for you, and told you the ideal order in which to target the terms, so that you pick up the most traffic most quickly. That's the sort of crystal ball that we're endeavoring to create here at Connors Communications with HitTail. And while our skills of prestidigitation are pretty sweet, we're not the super-seer of the Web just yet.

Give us time.

HitTail and the Affiliates - Love at First Sight

It does my heart good to hear someone pick up on the double, almost triple, entendre of our name, HitTail. We mean "hit" in the sense of a search hit, of course. You get search hits in the long tail of search, each one representing a visit by one individual—one visit being the quintessential "small success". But we also mean "hit" in the sense that Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, often uses it in discussing the blockbuster hit—and we certainly want HitTail to become that. But then, we're also a public relations firm (yes, a PR firm created HitTail), and whenever a client gets coverage in mainstream media, or even a blog, we call that a "hit" too.

So, I'm happy to hear a blogger proclaim HitTail is a Hit. I knew the Affiliate people were going to like HitTail. I get the feeling that the Affiliates are forced into the more shadowy realm of black hat SEO, because the competition is so fierce, and they're not offered a better way. Well, Affiliate programs are the definition of long tail search engine marketing. The products tend to be off the beaten track, seeking alternative means of distribution and an alternative sales force. The strange, but still lucrative, keywords associated with these products are as diverse as the products themselves, and it was inevitable that when HitTail and the Affiliate community found each other, it would be love at first site.

HitTail Vs. Digg - Which Works Better to Drive Traffic?

I find myself torn between taking HitTail's suggestions on what to write about, and my own gut instincts. Sometimes they align perfectly, and it's a no-brainer. You can't loose: write what you want to write about, and be assured it's going to generate traffic.

But the recurring question continues: how does HitTail work if I don't have enough content on my site to start with? The answer is "it doesn't". For people at that early stage of website development, HitTail's value is mostly that of being a real-time Search Hit monitor, which has a built-in "honesty-check". Huh?

Yep, HitTail tends to under-report search hits, due to strong philosophical beliefs that are tied to the HitTail suggestion algorithms. For example, every entry in the Search Hits tab corresponds to exactly one visitor. If the same referring source shows up 1000 times (such as when you get Dugg), then that corresponds to 1000 actual visitors. And watching that list as it flows by is just so much fun. So for sites starting out, I think my advice is to keep rolling out the content you think is appropriate, so that you reach critical mass, and HitTail kicks in and starts making writing suggestions. But also, try to write things that will get picked up and repeated.

For example, the biggest traffic driver lately has been this article by Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. He includes HitTail as one of the things to do in 2007 to help market your blog in 2007. Darren's article got Dugg 823 times as of this writing. The combination of the popular ProBlogger site, plus being Dugg must light up the content like a beacon for the aggregation thieves, because Google is currently reporting 39,300 pages that contain Darren's exact headline. Wow.

This makes me feel the need to share with the HitTail and SEO community in order to put in perspective the two very different aspects of online public relations and outreach. SEO is a slow build, taking months and sometimes years before it's firing on all cylinders and offsetting the need and cost of other marketing campaigns. But every once in awhile, you hit a homerun and get the benefit in very short order by getting Dugg (or previously, "SlashDotted"). So, what's the difference, and whose a candidate for getting Dugg?

Well, there's abundant articles on the Web about getting Dugg, so I won't repeat that here, suffice to say they advice pandering to the techno-snooty Linux crowd, and using superlatives like "the best", "the biggest" and the like. Regardless of whether or not Digg continues to hold the crown held yesterday by SlashDot and before that by Yahoo Cool Pick of the day, the timeless lesson to be learned here is that being cool, free and unique can offer a quick pop in traffic if you just get that headline right.

So, the magic shortcut to traffic comes down to what qualifies as cool, free and unique. Naturally, we're trying to make HitTail qualify, but more often its things like the ability to play Pong on a wristwatch. This "curiosity" driven audience is like the geek equivalent of the gossip rags. And anything having to do with marketing will be attacked by this crowd as disingenuous and not newsworthy (and wristwatch Pong is). So, you must choose your ammunition for getting Dugg with great care.

This is why "free" is such a big part of the Web 2.0 movement. If you can give something away for free which is of great value, it appeals very strongly and fosters spontaneous, genuine linking. You're essentially putting the world to work for you in a grass roots campaign without having to manipulate or "Astroturf" your audience. They will gladly do it for you out of gratitude.

But can everyone do this? No. It's for those with the creativity, production and support capacity and resources to put something of value out for free, and not destroying yourself in the process. There are multitudes of examples, suffice to say that HitTail itself is just one, and reveals a lot about its relationship to its creators, the top public relations agency, Connors Communications, in New York City. But for those who are not in the position to do this, there is always your advice and opinions.

And finally, that closes the loop between USING HitTail and building your natural search traffic. For those who can't get that big instantaneous diggable hit, you can simply develop their voice and opinions through blogging software, and take the slow, steady route, confident that the traffic will follow. If you write it, they will come—just not in the same numbers as the few days following getting Dugg.

Amongst The Best SEOs in the World

Connors Communications' reputation for world-class SEO has won us some very exciting clients, and recently, I've gone out to a client's site to personally become the SEO consultant. That's right, the creator of HitTail is also a gun for hire. This makes sense when you realize that HitTail was really an "extraction" of a larger system that's used privately for Connors' public relations clients. When Connors came to understand the broad application for part of our tools, and the rising popularity of the notion of the long tail, thanks to Wired Magazine's Editor, Chris Anderson, we decided to hit the metal while it was hot. Connors did after all work right along with GoTo.com to help establish the very pay-per-click industry itself, which Google has subsequently adopted and turned into the fastest growing segment of online advertising. We know these things, and can recognize when the time for a particular new technology has arrived.

It is in this spirit that we "extracted" HitTail from our client services, the way Ruby on Rail's creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, extracted ROR from the BaseCamp product. The best frameworks are not invented, but they are extracted from already successful products. The same way 37Signals lets people use BaseCamp for free—even without having to be Ruby on Rails programmers themselves—Connors is letting everyone use HitTail for free. Of course, we need to make money too, and along with a free superior product, we will be introducing not-free, even more superior features. We truly believe 2007 is the year of natural search, and we are faced with the conditions for the perfect storm. The fact that Jefferson Graham's article on natural search made it into the very mainstream USA Today is the most recent example of such evidence.

But what of me being an SEO consultant, and the future of HitTail? Easy—this is the fire in which future unexpected features are forged. Who better to invent a better mousetrap than someone overwhelmed by mice? So as the SEO engagement ramps up, I find my thought processes being brought back to the basics. I ask myself what do we know about the sites that must be improved? What do we know about the search results these sites are currently enjoying? What of the technical layout of the site do we know? And how might the site change in the future, so that any decisions I make have years of life left in them—no matter what? You see, the enemy is "scrap-and-rebuild", because for every company that goes through this process, another company is building upon their last success without interrupting their momentum. The challenge is one of continuity amidst transition. The challenge is one of knowing enough of the right things amidst limitless mountains of data. The challenge is absorbing all there is to know, without going crazy, and somehow coming out of it with a list of precise, action items that I myself can carry out so that I don't interrupt the normal flow of business.

This is the type of SEO services you get from Connors Communications, the creators of HitTail. While other SEO consultants gradually guide you towards PPC, compel you through a "scrap-and-rebuild" process, or slap a recommendations document in your hands, Connors speaks the technology architecture language of separation of concerns. We can actually tie into almost any back-end content management or publishing system, and install a perfectly optimized presentation layer, thereby preserving all your investments. Such strategies can produce massive short-term gains in driving new natural search traffic, breathe years of new life into old CMS systems, and buy a lot of time to make sure the transition to a new system is being done for the right reasons and at the right cost. This is not typical SEO, and we are even hesitant to call it that for fear of the baggage that it has already. But until some other name is chosen, we need to go on the record that some of the best SEO right now is going on out of a boutique public relations firm in New York City. Who would have guessed.

The Future of Search

It's time for me to start blogging again. It's been awhile, and I'd really like to make HitTail one of the must-read sites for SEO. Aaron Wall mentioned HitTail for the second time in his popular SEO Book site, for which we are particularly grateful, considering the recent surge in popularity he must be encountering as a result of the mention in the USA Today article by Jefferson Graham on natural search engine optimization. That article was significant, because it marks the difficult concept of SEO becoming part of the mainstream conscious the way pay-per-click had from all the Google profitability and IPO articles. The conditions are right for the perfect storm, and we plan for HitTail to be there. I believe 2007 will be the year of natural search.

In choosing the headline, Jefferson chose the concept "How to get Google to notice you". That is a brilliant approach, because it frames the issue by immediately anthropomorphizing Google—advice we consistently give to our clients when explaining how to guess what Google will be doing several years from now. Google is an algorithmic piece of Larry Page's brain, and is much closer to that original vision, named BackRub, from his days at Stanford than people realize. Even with their product offerings exploding through acquisition and intrepreneurship, their homepage and the assumptions behind the crawling and indexing process are eerily close to what they were in 1999 when I first noticed Google. You must put yourself into the mind of clever engineers who are a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Rainman. There is very little that Google might do over the coming years that someone of reasonable intellect couldn't guess. For example, if they're making many billions of dollars per year today on micro-transaction advertising, it only stands to reason that there's a two-front assault based around micro-transactions (as NOT applied to advertising), and advertising (as NOT applied to Web search).

But for the foreseeable future, the question on everybody's mind, or at least which should be, is how to make Google notice you. And to answer that question, I like to take a brief journey into the state of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, yesterday, today and tomorrow. Yesterday, Google was proud to announce 2 billion pages indexed, 8 billion pages indexed, 20 billion pages indexed. Today, they stop reporting, as the number has become meaningless, suffice to say that there's more pages on the Internet than there are people on the planet. If everyone on the planet read a page per day, they would probably never stop reading, especially considering the state of spamming, Moores' law, and the considerable content still locked up on the "invisible Web". There is simply too much information, and a finite number of people on the planet at any given time, performing a finite number of searches-and-clicks for any given time-period. And the great contest is the competition for those clicks so that advertising might be delivered or a customer created.

So, to compete in such a landscape, you must be rolling out both copious quantities of pages in order to keep pace with the rate of growth of the Internet, and high quality pages. Doing both and once seems incongruous, and it is. Hence the popularity of user contributed content. If you can get a community of several thousands of people generating several millions of pages—each one carefully thought out and considered, then you don't need to do it yourself. In a way, this is what MySpace, YouTube and every other UCC-based social networking site designed to influence search. Alternatively, instead of enticing people into your network, you can creep out into theirs by creating a superior advertising network, and basically have them run your ads for which you take credit for the ad impression, kick them back a little bit, and keep the rest. This is effectively what Google is doing with the AdSense network, and many others are trying to spin different ways.

The above scenarios are possible while maintaining a relative degree of quality, because you have a low human-to-page ratio. Each person in MySpace cares about their profile, and each person participating in an Ad Network cares about their site so as to maintain readership and subscribed audience. But then there are also the people who are just making a pure, unabridged play for search traffic and ad impressions regardless of quality. These types of people can spin out millions of pages at a time, and you're competing with them too. So, how is one to cope? How can one modest little blog or corporate site ever hope to compete?

Well, thinking of Google in the anthropomorphic sense, it has to keep pace or die. First, it must have brilliant algorithms for turning the tide of spam and removing the reward incentive for spammers. Second, it must keenly identify and reward those who should justifiably be rewarded. "Whoah!" You say? Why doesn't Google just start to reward paid advertisers. They can't. It's a detente. The moment Google stops rewarding the righteous is the moment an opening is created for a new breed of super-search competitor. They're out there, evolving in the shadows, starved for the mindshare sunlight they need to survive. So long as Google is the planet's top search-lifeform and the environment can sustain it, those preditors are relegated to picking up Google's crumbs. In order to remain this dominant creature, Google must give back to the environment what it consumes, and that is free natural search results. It's an equilibrium. The great balance and natural order of the Web at this time in history.

So again, how does one compete for natural search effectively today, and in a sustainable long-term fashion? Easy. Be righteous!

Be sincere. Be prolific. Write in a trustworthy and authoritative voice. Write often. Become genuinely trusted. Get people to subscribe to you. If there is an economic market involved, make yourself the epicenter of that market by offering information and services that are must-have for that market. Develop useful apps and give them away for free if you can, just to get the relationship. Treat your customers well and establish a reputation that transcends the online world. Make yourself a genuinely good company (social cause, or whatever) that people would be proud to refer to you. You will be leaving plentiful clues for the Sherlock Holmes Rainman to follow. No matter how search changes, they will go out of their way to ensure that you're rewarded according to the new rules.

And if you're still worried about making the wrong decisions for natural search, simply pick a blogging platform and start blogging. It's the ideal 80/20 rule solution to getting some immediate short-term results in natural search, while putting your data into a format that could always be transferred to whatever publishing systems come out in the future. There are copious articles on the extremely short-term tactics to employ for driving traffic to your site. This is a good one. Read it and follow the advice. And of course take advantage of long tail searches to make the time you do spend on natural search most effective. There's simply so much to do that you WILL be overwhelmed by the choices of directions. But if you put your faith in HitTail, you can sweep away 95% of the things which will distract you, and get down to the business of writing about those things which you know will pull in the best sort of qualified visitors. See? The last step is the final micro-tactic of simply choosing the right things to write about.

Maintenance Tonight

We will be doing some server maintenance tonight. We will stop collecting data for about 4 hours beginning 6:00PM EST. This will not affect any sites (HitTail JavaScript and GIF will continue to be served).