Today is the Last Chance to Lock-in the $49.95/yr introductory pricing.

Today is April 30th, the last day that we say thanks to our beta testers with the opportunity to lock-in never-to-occur-again introductory pricing of $49.95/year. After today, it's $99.95/year or $9.95/mo.

The special thing about this price is that we're never going to hike it on you so long as we offer this service. They call it getting "grandfathered" in, and makes you exempt from rate changes in the future.

My advice is to bank at least one of these accounts. You can always change which URL it's linked to.

Writing Topics

The essence of HitTail is writing topics — something to write about. Deal with writer's block. Have your own writer's muse.

Perhaps we're doing ourselves a disservice making it look too much like a keyword tool or analytics software. Comments welcome.

Who's Legit? HitTail, Apparently.

So these folks at Lijit appear to be a site-search tool that goes beyond Master.com, Rollyo and the usual suspects, by also allowing you to search bookmarks, blogs, blogrolls and more. I guess it's really an RSS feed search. Anyway, I blog this because they did some clever research, sending out a spider to determine the most popular widgets on the Ineternet. Imagine our surprise, barely a few weeks after releasing our HitTail widget, we show up on their radar.

I guess it's only appropriate that we start the long tail.

HitTail, MyBlogLog, Snap Previews and TypePad Explode in a Cacophony of Coolness

April has been a busy month for HitTail. We launched our premium service, built a TypePad Widget and a Blogger Widget, got into the SixApart's TypePad Widget gallery and newsletter, kept pace with exploding popularity, and recorded over 70 quotes and testimonials on your spanking new TypePad blog...

...all in this single month of April!

So, my challenge to you, the HitTailer, is to give us a quote. And you can do that merely by blogging about us.

We'll know.

It's a fairly sure bet that we're going to link back to you on that site. And while you're at it, check out how eerily cool HitTail, MyBlogLog and the Snap Website Previews work on a TypePad blog.

As it turns out, almost every HitTail quoter I'm linking to who published a positive HitTail comment online are themselves running HitTail. Therefore, whenever I construct a link to them, I am by definition alerting those HitTail-addicted folks of the fact that I linked to them.

Yes, as it turns out, you can view every single link or hit that comes into your site as an important event (as there are much fewer than almost everybody thinks).

And so, its mere moments between me linking to them, and them coming to see who just made a link to them.

This gives them a link, and an opportunity to review and comment upon their quote. Now, for the cool pictures.

People visiting the HitTail quote site get previews of the quoters' sites by merely mousing-over the links, thanks to Snap's cool website preview feature. And if they're a member of the cool MyBlogLog service, their picture appears on the website too as a recent visitor. Then I get to see their picture.

If this isn't an example of the cool undercurrents of the "online discussion" then I don't know what is.

Google Value Chain

Get ready for another one of my long, rambling posts. The pay-off is better understanding Google's value chain--and what a value chain IS. So, bear with me.

I'm a HUGE fan of the fundamentals of business. I often equate business principles back to the way it must have been at the dawn of the first village-cities, when seasonal herd migration patterns made seasonal cities into meeting places and giant swap-meets for our ancestors. They were just discovering things like taking a rock and artfully shaping it makes it able to be traded for MUCH more than the cost of the raw materials (picking it up off the ground). At some point in history was the first primitive conceptualization of what we know today as the manufacturing value chain.

The value chain is simply the process by which raw materials acquire more value as they get processed into finished goods. The best products have efficient value chains, where very low cost raw materials get converted into very high-cost products, with relatively little skilled labor or time spent manufacturing. Oil is one such product, because the raw materials are just sucked out of the ground (free?), and the refinement process allows you to spike the cost to above $65 a barrel (at the time of this writing).

Now THAT'S a business. To get much better, you have to look at Visa, which conducts $4.6 trillion per annum, and gets about 2.5%. That's about $115 billion per annum for just keeping the Visa/Mastercard uber-servers running--not even calculating in what the individual banks make on interest alone. The value chain is a bit more complicated here, but they've made YOUR reputation (the raw material) into something of value (credit-worthiness), and the product (debt) of value to THEIR customers (banks) so they can deliver the finished product (deferred payments, with interest).

Are you getting it?

Every business has a value chain, no matter how convoluted. Raw materials are taken. In the manufacturing process, value is added. The end customer generally pays a premium for that product, and everyone who adds value in the manufacturing process gets their cut. How valuable that cut is at each step, is known as the margin. This is true, whether your product is gasoline, donuts or deferred payments.

So, why all this gobbledygook in order to discuss Google's value chain?

Because one must follow a convoluted thought process just like with Visa. And it goes...

1. Nobody pays to use Google. No financial commitment has been made on the part of Google users to use Google. And it's only that sort of financial commitment and subsequent loss-of-face if the solution doesn't work out that locks you in as a customer to the vendor. If there's no cost of switching, and there was never really a purchase in the first place, then you're not a customer. You're a user. And mainstream users are notoriously disloyal to brand.

2. If WE are not Google's customers, and search is not Google's product, then what is? How can we even begin to examine Google's value chain if we can't even get the players straight? Well advertisers, specifically users of Google's AdWords service, are Google's customers. And traffic delivered to customer websites is the product. And the ability to explicitly control what traffic ends up on what websites is the whole of Google's value chain.

Google's ability to arbitrate traffic comes completely from users choosing them as the de facto standard choice for search. It's like club membership in a free club. It took nothing to sign up, and if you find another club, you can switch easily. But the fact that your club meetings are always successful and always a great hit, turns your club into a forum and a venue. Your club has taken raw materials (club membership) and added value (single-point exposure for advertisers). So now, the club is in the position to take sponsorships to help offset the cost of supporting the club.

That's Google... before IPO.

Now, take your club and make sure the hottest stars of the day are always in club attendance as guest speakers. Now, offer interested parties the ability to hold a stake in the club, on the off-chance the club becomes REALLY successful. Now, give that club a market capitalization of $149.2 billion dollars, which exceeds the amount of money being annually earned from advertisers by a factor of x10 (conservatively), and make it the top-recognized brand on the planet.

That's Google... now.

So, Google's value chain is collecting up the "club-less" wandering masses of the Web (the raw material or rocks), creating a series of turnstiles and wayfinding "signs" to route these people (shaping the rocks to arrowheads), and giving advertisers access to uniquely sorted and pre-qualified sets of these visitors, based on interests expressed through keyword searches, and now long web-surfing user profiles (the arrowhead marketplace).

Yes, understanding Google's value chain is still an esoteric process at best. And while there are plenty of established models in life and business to look at, what Google's doing is still so relatively new and at such a massive scale, that it's still a bit hard to wrap your mind around.

But do this little exercise. Take all the public market capital of every online search marketing company and add it together, and see if it comes anywhere near Google's $149.2 billion (you have to keep Microsoft out of the equation). All other search companies added together don't equal Google. Now, look at the percentage of search traffic that's reported to go to Google. Now, the numbers here vary, but you'll hear anywhere from 60% to 90%. If you have any doubt remaining that Google is in a position to dominate, and indeed replace the "Web" or "The Internet" as the big world computer network, then put it aside.

There's a generation of kids growing up Googling "Is Google God?"

It's a reasonable question, considering that at some point in any modern household, a frustrated parent upon being bombarded by the "Why... Why... Why..." child-ask game that always ends in God or the Big Bang, tells their kid to go ask Google.

Two and two, right? Google must be God. Now how's THAT for brand loyalty?

Well, I'm here to say that having achieved the level of success that Google has, but with the entire foundations built on a shaky business premise and "club membership" goodwill value chain, that the first priority is to fortify and diversify. The AdWords money keeps pouring in, because Google charges those who cannot find their own audience to use Google's visitor routing capability.

But what if you no longer needed Google in order to find your audience?

What if there was a method for finding your audience that worked with Google, but did not require you to pay? What if that same method worked with Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com?

Is that something you might be interested in?

What if using that method actually resulted in you building a business asset, as surely as if you were expanding a distribution network, increasing warehouse size, growing the size of your fleet of trucks, or buying property where you could run your own billboard ads? And if expanding that infrastructure only cost you (essentially) the cost of labor?

Is that something you might be interested in?

Well, that's HitTail. HitTail is based on the premise that no matter how things change, something is "always nearly working for you". And by zeroing in on what's almost working for you, and merely knowing one or two of the important factors for relevancy, you can make tiny tweaks and systematically push these results over the edge (onto the first page of results).

We understand that things may change dramatically.

We know that technologies like Ajax, and radically new search technologies, such as small world theory, social arbitrage, surfing animated ontologies and the like are going to make things crazy-new.

But even then, there are going to be things that are "almost working for you" and clues that can be zero'd in on, which nobody else has thought to look at (but we have). So, there will always be HitTail. And HitTail will always remain a sustainable, long-term, cross engine marketing technique, that could even carry over into a post-Bubble 2.0 burst world.

Huh? A Web 2.0 bubble you ask? But cash hasn't been flowing into startups anywhere near the insane rate of the late-nineties.

Sure it has. It's just been betting safer. Follow the market capitalization to know where the Web 2.0 bubble currently resides. And marketers, hedge your bets with a low-cost, long-term, cross-engine AdWords alternative.

eBay buys StumbleUpon, Google jabs eBay

With eBay rumored to buy StumbleUpon and Google announcing plans to develop a StumbleUpon competitor, the need for "real-time analytics" has skyrocketed. The main thing about these services, and services like Digg, is that they cause sudden traffic spikes, instead of the evenly distributed swell that Google index inclusion creates. As such, there are important hosting and social networking elements to consider. First, you must be able to sustain maybe 100,000 visits in a single day. Second, you must be able to identify when such surges are occurring and take action on THE SAME DAY to leverage the new traffic. Do you have a call-to-action on that page? Is all the traffic bouncing? For these reasons and more, you need HitTail, and the ability to watch your referrer traffic in real-time. Watch the Digg Effect, the StumbleUpon Effect, and soon, the Google Effect, in real-time.

Web 2.0 Expo - SEO & SEM Trends to Watch

Even while HitTail wasn't speaking at Web 2.0, one of our favorite people and advocates was: David Berkowitz of 360i Search Marketing. We love 360i, and run into them often, as neighboring New Yorkers, and co-sponsors of one of the Search Insider Summit conferences. So it was with extreme pleasure, that we saw Amy Cham blogging live from the conference, and recounting David naming us as the tool of choice for emerging trend #9 (long tail optimization) to watch. Thanks, David. We definitely need advocacy like this coming out of beta, and launching our premium service. And thanks, Amy Cham. We enjoy getting inside your head, and look forward to many more blogging-from-the-seat-of-your-pants, like you're doing at the Web 2.0 Expo. Or would that be blogging-from-the-hip? Real-time blogging? Whatever you want to call it, we like.

Free Hits

I was recently challenged to sum up HitTail in 2 words. Sure, we bring you free traffic, which leads to higher overall potentially qualified sales prospects, and ultimately customers. And HitTail becomes one pillar of a marketing campaign designed to ultimately free you from pay-per-click advertising networks, like AdWords. And I'd love to talk about the "end results" of a healthier company that employs cross-engine optimization tactics that will outlive any particular search engine.

But after long pondering, and a 2-word limit, I'd have to say...

Free Hits!

SEO, VC & Blogging - Comparing Events, Crowds & Comfort Levels

I attended Darren Rowse's ProBlogger meetup in NYC a few weeks back, and met almost everyone in the room. And he took over almost an entire floor of a popular New York City bar. I was totally comfortable and in my element, as folks like Keith Levenson of Vibrator.com went around popping promo stickers on people's shoulders. I was like "yeah... I can personally meet everyone in this room." Keith pretty much set the tone.

Then a few weeks later, I attended a Venture Capitalist event at a prestigious Union League sponsored by Red Herring. It was the Monday before Search Engine Strategies, and I was trying to get into social mode (sometimes difficult for me). High on ProBlogger, I felt it would be a breeze. Brrrrr, was I wrong. The button-down'd VCs were decidedly NOT the same profile as the rabid blogorati of the NYC area. And my education into how to work dramatically different crowds began. Not that it was bad. Just that it's not "me". I guess if it was, I'd be a VC and not one of the Web developer / executive cross-overs types that they like to fund.

I struck it off very well with the cross-over crowd, such as Laird Popkin, the CTO of Pando, a P2P torrent-like file sharer, with whom I could talk tech. Equally engaging was Angelo Valenti, an Executive and Entrepreneurial Coach, who immediately identified me as someone needing coaching, and gave the invaluable advice to play the "billionaire card". Those who look most out of place are often the ones with the best ideas and most money. They don't know you from a Web 2.0 billionaire. Use it. And if you wanted to play the Sesame Street game "which one of these is not like the other," there was the aventurista, Sarah Tavel, who turned out to be a VC AND a blogger. So, there were some nice highlights.

And of course, the host, Alex Vieux, the publisher of Red Herring, was an absolute pleasure to meet. But the majority of the room was an inscrutable mystery to me. I guess that's why I've hitched my apple cart to Connie's wagon.

And finally, there was SES, which while I only attended one day (Thursday), turned out to be one of the most auspicious events I ever attended. It's amazing the difference between being someone and not being someone can make. If I was a nobody at the VC event, and I was a pseudo-celebrity at the ProBlogger event, then I was half-way in-between at Search Engine Strategies. Fortunately, Danny Sullivan, Lee Odden, and a few of the other panelists knew me. But this mainstream marketing crowd curious about how to use search most decidedly doesn't know the "in the know cool sites."

Working the SES crowd was harder than ProBloggers (really our sweet spot), but WAY easier than the VC crowd. There's no intro like: here's a tool to build your natural search traffic. Oh yeah, it's free. The auspicious part was that I was meeting people left and right who I worked years previously to meet. I coincidentally met Neil Patel, "blogmaster" behind Guy Kawasaki's sites, who I've been in touch with on and off for years. This was from a random walk-up intro to a panelist, who in-turn recognized my name! I'd love to go on and name everyone, but let me just shout out to Stan Barett and Marshall Sponder, the look-alike's who don't know eachother, but whom I see at the same events, and sometimes have to wait until I hear an English accent before I say "Hi Stan" or "Hi Marshall".

Bottom line lesson of this blog: every event is like a life form manifestation of the event's host and their audience. Some you take to, as if they're old friends. Some are just tough to figure out. And some just take a little warming up to.

HitTail's 30 Second Elevator Pitch at SES NYC 2007

This was perhaps the best Search Engine Strategies (SES) I ever attended, in great part, instead of being one undifferentiated SEO in the crowd, I was Mike Levin the HitTail guy. Unlike previous years, where I attended all four days and came away with only enough to make it worth it, this time I only attended yesterday (Thursday), and came away with a lot. I mean, an awful lot.

I'd love to share all the funny anecdotes that were packed into just one day. But the first thing I want to get out of my mind and into the blogosphere is the highly effective 30-second elevator pitch.

HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts -- to help you grow your natural search traffic... free.

It works much like analytics software with a simple line of JavaScript code. For users of major platforms (Blogger, TypePad and WordPad), there are plug-ins to facilitate installation of the code, making it easy for even total newbies.

Every website has some search-life in it. Every website is trying to tell you something.

Most analytics packages overlook the most important event: when some determined visitor finds you buried several pages into search. This tells you two things:

1. There is actual traffic occurring on this term, and you CAN/ARE being found on it.
2. There are several pages of crap ahead of you which didn’t satisfy the visitor. The hit was probably coincidental, often a result of unlikely word combos from archive pages.

So the reasoning goes, if you intentionally target it, you can bring yourself from several pages in on that term to the first page.

Keep this up over time, and you will grow your search engine traffic, naturally.
It may even free you (being marketers) from reliance on Google AdWords to drive traffic.

Oh yeah. It’s free.

Works every time.

The Optimum Ratio in The Long Tail of Search

Recently, HitTail forum user bvadel asked an insightful question. What's a healthy site in terms of the ratio of "head" keywords to "longtail" keywords? He generously offers his site's statistics of 13% in the top-10 keyword head, and 87% in the long keyword tail.

Yes, bvadel. That's quite good. Here's how I answered...

Let's look at the life of a site.

Upon launching a brand new site, first there are zero search hits.

Then your first Google hit occurs, hopefully about 7 days in. We know that's not realistic for everybody, but stick with us, and we'll show you how.

On that first hit, your ratio is 100% head keywords, 0% tail keywords (using the Top-10 methodology that HitTail employs).

This ratio continues right up to and including your 10th unique search hit. 100% / 0%.

On the 11th unique hit, your ratio starts to change. You're 90.1% head keywords and 9% long tail keywords. It's still very skewed towards your "most popular" even though the hit count of your 11th word isn't really any different. What's in the head and what's in the tail (such as it is) is arbitrary at this point.

Time passes.

In about 3 months, considering you're publishing diligently, your tail starts to form. The traffic that resulted from your top-10 keywords starts to proportionally shrink compared to the totaling of the less popular tail keywords.

90/10 becomes 80/20 becomes 70/30 becomes 60/40, until finally they meet at 50/50.

If you're doing your job well, this is only about 6 months into a brand new site. You are blogging every day, right?

Now, the rate at which the ratio flips slows down.

You creep to 30/70. And in about a year, you settle down to what is the average of all our HitTailers, which is ironically 20/80.

That is, 20% of your traffic is resulting from your top-10 keywords, and 80% of your traffic is from everything else.

This is one of the FEW places HitTail will ever look across everyone's data--getting the head vs. tail averages, because it is of great value to the industry at large from a statistical standpoint.

Now here's the rub.

Every once in awhile, a mega-popular site signs up for HitTail. They hardly need it. They're massively popular, to the point that we either have to charge them for the heavy volume premium service, or trade service for service (which we occasionally do).

And those people have ratios like 5/95.

That's right.

Their top 10 keywords are responsible for maybe less than 5% of their overall traffic.

This spectacular fact turns a lot of blockbuster economics on its head, in which 2% of the inventory selection accounts for 80% of the revenue--even at "long-tail" retailers like Amazon.com.

It takes awhile to digest, but it's true.

The more popular your site becomes, the less you rely on any particular keywords.

Popular sites are diversified, and skew heavily towards the tail.

NYC Search Engine Super Powers

Search Engine Super Powers of NYC... UNITE!!!

Join the city's most authorative meetup group on optimizing, e-commerce, blogging, and search engine marketing.

How to generate traffic

Use HitTail. This incredibly short post will demonstrate to you that even the most competitive terms, such as the one in the headline here, can be targeted and moved to the homepage of Google with relative ease. The "trick" of how to do this is one of the most closely guarded secrets of online journalism. HitTail is a site dedicated to blowing the lid of this secret. We let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by illustrating the effectiveness of long tail online marketing techniques.

When your model is an advertising-driven model, articles like this one by an online jouranlist give a few more pointers.

One Word SEO Demo

This may be a fleeting occurrence based on the rapid recent construction of links to the HitTail site as a result of some very high-profile coverage (thanks, John!).

But yes, we come up very high right now on the single word "demo".

I only know this because someone clicked through on it about 5 minutes ago, and HitTail issued it as a suggestion.

We debated over whether to allow single-words to ever reach the suggestion tab on their own. And after long deliberation, we've decided to call them out under the Keywords tab, but not move them to suggestions, because of the futility of working them up.

But now having HitTail appear for the word "demo" in Google 4 pages in, I am sorely tested. It is at least worth HitTailing one post. I particularly liked the double-entendre of the headline I got to use.

But the rub is that Google is particularly sensitive to the RATE at which links are being constructed. So if a whole bunch of links just got created to us on the term "demo", it pushes us up short-term for the word demo.

This is a warning we always give to our clients. Don't get too excited with brand-new eerily cool results. The elation is premature. Premature Googlelation?

WOW, I would have loved to have used THAT as the headline. But the idea here is to get into the path of pre-existing traffic patterns with the headline alone. So, the headline is really where you need to make as few compromises as possible on word choice and arrangement from the HitTail suggestion.

There are a few things to point out.

The process of discovering where we position on a word we're not yet monitoring, is sometimes known as Passive Rank Analysis. Some competitors make a big deal of this as a feature, because it reduces the need to proactively spider the search results, and therefore violate the terms of use of most search engines, or alternatively, use their API, where the results are not necessarily the same as a genuine search.

Well, we've never made a big deal of passive rank analysis. We just figured that's how HitTail should work. It's not about tracking positions of your known keywords (benchmarks). Instead, it's about reporting on the activity of ACTUAL keyword hits (actuals). HitTail lives in the actuals.

The next point here is that Connors regularly gets the coveted one-word keywords for our clients. We thought long and hard before making this statement, but yes, we have several hard-and-fast cases. The downside is that one-word keywords, as cool as they are, are actually less significant than one may think, as they are excessively general, and don't necessarily produce the targeted traffic you desire. But none-the-less, it's desirable, because you're in a much better position on that word plus any other word.

A third point to make here is that I thought our one-word "root" for which we ascended was going to be "long" or "tail" or the made-up "longtail". And indeed, we're rising on all three (page 3 for just tail). But picking up a strong position on the term "demo" is just a logical bonus.

I had locked myself in a room for a week to make the long tail demo of which they speak. And it was apparently a very worthwhile endeavor, and worth the effort, as we are referred to as the way to understand long tail thinking (aside from Chris' book, of course). Or perhaps as the fastest pitch evah. It could be that the YouTube version has thousands of views, and is joining the ranks of viral video in terms of pure reach. Or maybe, people recognize it as one of the most creative demos and websites they ever came across.

And finally, it's really unrealistic to take the steps one would have to take from an SEO standpoint at this point to fortify HitTail on the term, demo. We're just not in the business of demos (though we're repeatedly asked). The work it would take to truly fortify a one-word term is ridiculous; landing page 4 is one thing, but the increased resistance encountered as you creep up the SERPs is enormous.

I'd be spending all my time doing that instead of doing it for paying Clients, or blogging for the HitTail community.

How would King Solomon Approach SEO Today?

What does the search on your name produce? And how does that relate to the story of King Solomon's Wisdom? And how does that relate to why HitTail is awesome for the SEO industry, although not everyone sees it that way?

This and more, I will answer in this post.

Everyone performs vanity searches on one's own name, occasionally. And once in awhile, a Website owner or marketer will use a person's name in a piece of content either to get that person's attention, or to try to intercept search traffic on that person's name. When the publisher is a search engine optimizer, it's fair to say that they're trying to own a little piece of YOUR reputation. So beware! As HitTail rockets in popularity, and the mainstream marketing world realizes that TypePad, WordPress, SquareSpace and Blogger are their ticket to professional-level optimization, merely by adding HitTail, some of the SEOs come out of the woodwork seeing this as a threat, instead of the groundswell of opportunity for the SEO industry that it is.

Let me explain.

HitTail takes advantage of the fact that blogging software is so enormously tweaked-out optimized out of the box, that mainstream marketing can get into the SEO game much more easily than ages past. The intimidation is removed, and you are less reliant on overpriced consultants to get into the game. Some blogging software packages are free, and HitTail is free. It's a powerful combo.

BUT all this is allowing is mainstream marketing to get into the game. It doesn't make them experts. And some rumors are going around that tiny tweaks to these blogging software configurations can result in as much as a 20% gain in traffic.

While no one walks away from 20% more traffic, isn't it true that SEO's are quite capable of producing 1000% (or more) gains in traffic by those now-industry-standard practices of making sites have search friendly URLs and a sitemap, thereby taking previously invisible sites out of the invisible web? 1000% gains have been reduced to 20% gains? And the work was changing 5 lines of code in a blogging configuration? And people are bragging?

The real story here is that SEO'ing a TypePad site could ONLY result in a 20% gain in traffic.

But that doesn't change the fact that most sites out there are deployed on platforms that are not search optimized, and there is plenty of business to go around there, fixing it.

And most marketing people are scared into paralysis at the thought of blogging and joining the online discussion, so there is plenty of business to go around there, setup, training, and blogging on their behalf until they get with the program.

And even when they are blogging on their own, there are still those template tweaks that get you incrementally more traffic, and all the social media manipulation where you attempt to get "homepage'd" by the likes of Digg and Netscape. So, there's plenty of business there.

And once someone lands on your site, there's many things that can go wrong, preventing the conversion. This is the world of multivariate testing and A/B switch testing. And there's plenty of business there.

So, for the life of me, I can't figure out why a certain brand of SEO gets so nervous about the idea of just any marketing Joe being able to carry out a natural search marketing campaign the same way they could an AdWords campaign these days, using the right PPC and bid management tools. The tools have gotten so good, that even busy media buyers could manage a couple of campaigns on the side. HitTail is exactly that, but on the organic search side.

And as opposed to seeing this as a threat, today's SEO's (and most do) should see this as a validation of their premise, and a vindication of arguments they've been making for years. Google gives it away for free to those who get it so they can charge those who don't.

So what if a larger set of people are being sorted into the group that get it? So what if any marketing Jane or Joe can now get into the natural search game? You weren't going to win these people as $5K/mo. clients anyway. They're just getting their feet wet in the shallow end of the pool. And they have real marketing jobs, with diverse responsibilities, including events, tradeshows, brochures, telemarketing, business development, video production, and appeasing the company officers. They're NOT going to be the ones configuring the blogging software or carrying out a URL rewrite project in Apache.

So don't worry.

This is where I invoke a biblical story of King Solomon. Two women come before King Solomon with a baby, disputing who the real mother is. Solomon says to resolve the dispute, simply cut the baby in two, giving each woman half, at which time the real mother steps forward and says "NO!" Let the other woman have the baby, at which the King knows who the real mother is.

I tell this story of Solomon to anyone who accuses HitTail of oversimplifying the SEO challenges in this day and age. King Solomon wasn't stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. And in this case, I'm blowing the lid of of one of SEO's most closely guarded secrets so that the mainstream marketing community can get in on the game.

And this doesn't threaten REAL SEO's.

That's right.

I'm saying that the less-skilled SEO's think I'm saying "cut the baby". But I'm not. I'm upping the ante and increasing the size of the pot.

It's not a zero sum game.

In popularizing HitTail and long tail keyword targeting through blogging software, I am mainstreaming the entire field of SEO, which no matter how much business you think you're getting today, is nothing compared to the approximately $5 - $10 billion slice of the pie that's going mostly to PPC campaigns and AdWords (keyword media buying vs. banner buying).

And it's going to be A LOT larger in the coming years. SEO will either grow proportionately, shrink or grow as an overall percentage. Giving SEO a larger piece of the pie will require a re-calibration, of which HitTail plays a fundamential role.

This re-calibration will have a much larger portion of marketing budgets going to SEO than does currently today. But to make such a re-calibration occur, many people need to be aware of WHAT SEO IS, and the benefit that natural search optimization can provide. It's groundswell. We need PULL so SEOs can spend less time pushing.

And there's no surer way to make mainstream groundswell than letting the mainstream get a taste of natural search optimization themselves.

And even then, we have to deal with the concept of website optimization overshadowing search engine optimization, as I've written about in my recent Media Post article.

Search Engine Strategies

Search Engine Strategies starts today. I'll be in attendance at the conference on Thursday, but in town all week. If anyone wants chat about HitTail while you're in town, just email hittail at connors dot com, and we can sync up on what evening events we're attending.

Long tail keyword research

HitTail has long been referred to as one of the tools for long tail keyword research. But on searching the term, I did not see it on the first page of results. Just about every entry on page one of the Google results was a HitTail review. But the site itself was oddly missing.

Here, we notice another HitTail issue. It's based on long tail keyword "actuals". Just because a word combination CAN lead to a site, doesn't mean it ever will. As it turns out, the HitTail site is currently found eight pages in. But that happenstance surf, click, suggestion will never occur, because too many prior pages are good candidates to the curious searcher.

What can we conclude? Well, HitTail is uniquely suited to spaces where all the prior pages are unappealing, and they STILL find you. This is why it's SO EASY to pick up the traffic from a HitTail suggestion. The implication is that not only is it a keyword where traffic exists, but it's a space where all the other content is unappealing.

But then, how would I ever think to target the new term? The answer is, I didn't have to. I actually am incredibly optimized on that term, because there is functionally no escape from HitTail once you're researching that phrase. But the question we must ask as the HitTail developers, is whether that is a generality. Should we keep our suggestions hardwired to actuals, or should we "spike" them with speculative terms from other sources?

BlogKing hits on the chicken and egg issue in his latest post, where he recommends reading the news in the morning, commenting in the afternoon, and checking your traffic in HitTail in the evening (or a few days later) to go another round. Going another round implies zeroing in on where the traffic is REALLY at.

And therein lays the true answer to what this post asks. Start with keywords that you KNOW SHOULD lead to your site, based on whatever sources, be it intuition, brainstorming, keyword inventory tools, the morning news, or wherever. Once you've "seeded" your site with content, watch what HitTail is trying to tell you in its capacity as a web suggestion box.

You might have been close with your original post, but you could really hit it home and optimize your website for natural traffic with just one more post.

Findability

HitTail is about findability in light of enormous competition. In the old world, where finite shelf space, finite broadcast channels, finite column inches, the mega-hits pretty much shut out small business. But even in those days, small business still thrived on a local level.

The Internet changes things in allowing you to collect the disparate and desperate, condensing and concentrating it into some decent business, where there was no business before. And even such a viable business, no matter how lucrative it is on a personal small business level, doesn't even show up on the radar of big business.

This is why Chris Anderson's opinions about the long tail hold true, just as the opposing voices of Lee Gomes and Dave Taylor. The opinion that the top 2.7% of Amazon's products produce 75% of the revenue is completely consistent with long tail teachings. Why? Because the long tail demand curve is 1/X. That means that the popularity of products at the head of the curve are ENORMOUSLY popular. Indeed, it approaches infinite.

It's just that the equally infinite diversity of non-popular products/services are not denied their markets. No matter how tiny the business in the long tail seems in comparison to mega-hits, it's nice business nonetheless. And it's all about findability. That's how the Internet has changed things. That's how Google has changed things. Finite shelf space, broadcast channels, and column inches have been replaced by infinite product supply and infinite findability.

And the best way to ensure your findability is to put yourself in the path of existing search patterns with some predictable keywords, then watch what happens. What you'll discover is countless additional keyword variations. The collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd dwarfs any single person or group's ability to guess. Therefore, with the right tools, you can start with simple, competitive findability, and spiral outwards with less competitive, but more diverse keyword phrases, and "flesh out" the mesh of your findability net.

Graphics Contest

Let's call this a Web 2.0 graphics contest. That means I'm throwing caution to the wind, and asking for submissions from all you graphic designers, Photoshop users, GIMP chimps and miscellaneous artists. Can you do the HitTail user interface better? Michele thinks so. If you prove him correct, we promise you nothing, but whatever fame and glory exposure on the HitTail site can deliver.

This may or may not amount to anything.

In order to facilitate this mission, I'm thinking of getting more involved in the graphics communities, especially here in NYC, where there are so many of you. Maybe a NYC graphic designer meetup? Who knows. In-person meetings are not required to participate. Just email entries to us at hittail at connors dot com. Be sure to only email GIFs or JPEGs. No attachments other than GIFs or JPEGs will be opened.

Anyway, we'll throw in a free premium HitTail account to the winner. But we promise no exposure whatsoever if you're not chosen (though we may send a complimentary shout-out). And we don't even promise that we're going to choose a winner. Sound fair? But seriously, anyone who reads our stuff knows we're good folks and are generous sharing the spotlight.

If your entry knocks us out, and we choose to use it, we will make you sign releases proving that we're allowed to use it, and then we're going to promote you on the site. If you're an ambitious graphic designer trying to make your mark, this is a chance to design graphics for a Web 2.0 startup whose success, judging by the buzz on the Internet, is likely assured. Nice feather in your cap.

A critical rule of the contest is to know what HitTail is and what it does. You need to understand the list-pairing concept. You have to experiment with paging forward and back through the datagrid and notice how there's no "position popping". That's an unusual thing in a datagrid, tied to the use of non-proportional fonts. All applications should have one homepage graphic, and one interior page graphic containing the datagrid. It's a user interface design project. Notice the mouse-overs used in HitTail. The application needs to be designed as self-documenting, compelling the user to do right without resorting to help screens.

I encourage working a concept such as "writing suggestion tool" or "build traffic" into the navigational design, so that no matter what page you're visiting, the HitTail "story" is being told in an encapsulated visual format. We're talking an attempt to instantly communicate what HitTail's about on each and every page. Two jpegs. Send to hittail at connors dot com.

The Lost Art of Writing Well

Writing copy all over the Internet is getting mangled in the name of search engine optimization. HitTail aims to bring back the lost art of writing well, by excusing you from targeting the most competitive terms. These are the terms that make you jump through hoops and do backflips in order to move up by one page, tweaking keyword densities, moving words around on the page, and otherwise doing things a good writer shouldn't.

Back in the days of print, this criteria was known as "word count", and The New York Times joke was "All the news that fits, we print." A play on their motto "All the news that's fit to print."

Well, today's online world has the equivalent. If you're not being found through Google, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. That might be an overstatement, as running things on the homepage of massively popular sites is a viable alternative to a Google search. But who gets their stuff run on the homepage of the NYT or MSN websites? That's why Digg has become so massively popular so quickly. It gives the little guy a fighting chance, without being beholden to Google or other big media.

Even the old-school big-media guys are giving up their beloved double entendre headlines, in favor of matter-of-fact headline. Every few months, big media runs a story about how headlines have to just get to the facts, because it's generally the headlines that show in Google. And if it's not DIRECTLY about what you're looking for, it's not going to get the click.

So, how does HitTail remedy this?

First, you must understand that there are 2 types of matter-of-fact headlines...

1. Those that will get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic easily.
2. Those that will never get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic.

That's right. It's all a grab for pre-existing traffic patterns. No one is going to search on what you wrote about BECAUSE you wrote about it. The cause/effect relationship is exactly the reverse off what most people think.

People will find you because what you wrote about GETS IN THEIR PATH.

Being a cat-owner, never was this as clearly demonstrated to me as the outbreak of poison cat-food. It was a massive pattern of traffic that never existed before. But when the story broke, everyone started searching on it. Then more and more pages popped up getting into the path of those surfers. An entrepreneurial cat food manufacturer would have had dozens of pages out there explaining how their cat food is guaranteed safe, complete with an online ordering form. They could have had a windfall, but probably missed their window by now. I know there's not pages like that out there, because I didn't find them. They're targeting the wrong--or too small--of a list of keywords and phrases.

Once you construct a headline that you KNOW will tap into pre-existing traffic (thanks to HitTail suggestions), it frees you up to write well on the rest of the page. Imagine the burden of knowing that all that SEO criteria for getting the search hit simply goes away. Writers can do what they do best: write. And because writers write to be read, they can have peace of mind, because they know they will be read, simply by virtue of selecting an effective headline.

So don't simply write your headlines in a matter-of-fact style to appease search. Write your headlines KNOWING you're tapping into pre-existing traffic corridors. Or as a speculative alternative, write about topics that you KNOW WILL have the traffic patterns. Can you say, Election 2007? That reminds me, political bloggers should really be using HitTail to raise their voice above the fray of the noisy blogosphere. But that's another story.

Ajax Datagrid with Database

OK, this post about Ajax Datagrids is for the geeks. I've done plenty of posts discussing why HitTail is so amazing as a blogging tool, but only occasionally have I addressed the phenomenal feat of displaying all the world's logfile data in real-time.

Why do more Web apps not do this? There are several reasons, but one is how massive the data is. I mean, it's very massive. We're already letting you step in real-time through hundreds of millions of records, with HitTail less than a year old. Before long, when you click that "next" link, you'll be navigating database consisting of billions, if not trillions of records.

And it's all in real-time: next, next, next. Prev, prev, prev. First, last.

And just to flex our muscle, we even go as far as to highlight the keywords for easy visual perusal, and hyperlink them for easy visiting.

This is all done in one simple, elegant Ajax datagrid.

I don't think we'll tell you how we're able to accomplish this, while so few others have. Suffice to say, SQL is not your friend. Web application development tools, particularly the integrated development environments (IDE's) with record sets, are not your friends. Even agile development frameworks with active records, such as Ruby on Rails, is not really your friend.

To make a box capable of manipulating and letting you navigate such massive amounts of data in real-time with such performance requires thinking outside the box. Early-on, I tried describing how we're doing this to a few respected colleagues, and SQL has made the database programming community so myopic, that it may be impossible to program incredibly high performance record-stepping applications that don't require huge record sets and cursors, therefore ruining scaling. The technique is called the indexed sequential access method (ISAM), and it's broken on the Web. In fact, it may have never hit the Web (as far as I know), and HitTail may be the only known example (someone correct me).

So, what's behind HitTail? An enterprise database like IBM DB/2? Oracle? Sybase or Informix?

Open source like MySQL, Postgress or Ingress?

Or perhaps a true ISAM database like BTreive (underlying Pervasive)?

The answer may surprise you.

Much is not what it seems in the world of databases, where the ability to construct a high performance Ajax datagrid is more a state of mind than a particular platform.

You have to throw out everything you know, then successfully deal with a whole new set of problems.

If you're a tech geek with a blog or website, and want to play around with the aforementioned ajax datagrid, then simply register for HitTail. Put the snippet of code on your website. And start surfing the set of records which, among the hundreds of millions of other records, are yours alone.

Best Writing Topics

Explaining what HitTail is is strangely all-consuming. In the HitTail demo, we emphasize the point that we're not analytics software, though everybody keeps asking. We're a writing suggestion tool. WE... JUST... DO... SUGGESTIONS!

Now that we have a critical mass of blog posts built up, HitTail itself starts to give us suggestions.

And one such suggestion is "best writing topics".

As usual, HitTail reaffirms the funny fact that the collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd far exceeds any single person, or even a group of people's ability to brainstorm keywords. It even exceeds the ability of keyword suggestion tools, such as the keyword inventory tools built into AdWords and Yahoo Panama, to guess what's going to UNIQUELY produce for YOU.

Let me explain that.

Your website is already a keyword suggestion box. You're just not listening to the suggestions, if you're not using HitTail yet. So, how are HitTail's keyword suggestions better than anyone else's?

Because we're selecting the best writing topics for that title field or headline field of your blogging software. Simply work the HitTail keyword suggestion into a sensible headline that works within the context of your site, and you have the best topic for drawing in new audience.

We know this, because we've proven it time and time again with our own SEO clients. The HitTailing technique was so reliable, in fact, and underutilized within the context of a hand-full of high-end Connors clients, that we decided to let the world participate. Now, we're literally responsible for thousands of people optimizing tens-of-thousands of topics, bringing in highly qualified prospects, and hopefully converting them into customers and audience.

Indeed, within a few years, we hope to have helped hundreds of thousands of writers raise their voice above the din, and draw in millions of new prospects and readers.

And we hope to count you among them.

You've literally got nothing to lose.

Keyword Tool

It's undeniable. Keyword tools are everywhere, and everyone's spinning their own version and working them into their pay-per-click campaign marketing dashboards. Third party tools harvest keywords from second-tier search sites, such as InfoSpace's WebCrawler. First-party tools incorporate Yahoo results into Panama and Google results into the AdSense fetures--known as keyword inventory tools, with the added bonus of reporting keyword traffic stats and monetary value. And some keyword tools even do their own crawls, harvesting keywords off of competitor's sites, search results, APIs, or yank them right out of the datastream, in cooperation with participating ISPs.

Yes, there are unlimited numbers of ways to come up with keyword lists to help with your natural and paid search campaigns.

But we like ours.

It's simplistic in its conception, to the point of strange.

Yet it's effective in practice, to the point of unfair.

And that technique is harvesting keywords right from your website's own logfiles. But instead of merely pulling "the long keyword list" as so many analytics products allow, we pair down the list with at least two passes, so you don't have to.

And for anyone whose done serious keyword research, you can appreciate how much time this saves you. You get YOUR BEST LIST of keywords to target before you even export anything to Excel.

Think about that for a minute.

If you don't get it, forward the link to this article to someone in online marketing who you trust, who you think might get it. Ask them how creative and time-saving they thing this is. Ask them how it might improve your online marketing campaigns, and indeed, your life--by giving you time back for your families, hobbies and friends. Think how it could make your boss love you, those around you admire you, and take you one tiny step closer to being indispensable.

Exactly HOW does this radically different keyword research work flow happen?

We take the precious time that keyword geeks are flushing down the toilet by saving all their log files forever, running complex Regular Expression matches against them, ensuring that the work it suggests isn't duplicating work you've already done--and we distill it all down to one little Suggestions tab.

That's a long way of saying: "We tell you what to write about."

When the story of HitTail first broke, co-founder of Wired Magazine, John Battelle, was a little dubious about this "telling you what to write about stuff". And what good editor and writer wouldn't be? It sounds like one more spam-promoting tool to shift even more power into the hands of disingenuous bloggers just making a traffic-grab to increase their AdSense beer money.

But we held firm, by not creating an API that would allow spam-mash-ups. We held firm, by teaching our users about quality and distinctive online voices resulting in long-term reputations. We held firm by practicing HitTailing ourselves, demonstrating how just because you know you're going to get the traffic by mere virtue of smart headline selection, doesn't mean you can fill a page with garbage. We held firm by positioning it as a tool for reputable bloggers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) striving to get and keep customers directly, instead of yet-another-SEO-tool for AdSensers.

So here we are, as the one tool that consistently gets mentioned side-by-side with Google Analytics as the one must-have piece of tracking code. If you're only going to run two things to help improve your website, then those two things should be Google Analytics and HitTail. And that only makes sense, because would Google ever provide you a keyword tool that would increase your natural search performance, and bring down the cost of your AdWords campaigns?

Of course not.

Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen and the Suggestion Box

OK, just one quick blog post today, as I dive deep into my work. I likely won't be checking email much today, or taking phone-calls, as I have to finish some very large deliverables for a client. But I wanted to get a post out on one of the topics that has been coming up over and over.

Yes, HitTail suggests what to write about.

Yes, HitTail does this based on the existing activity on your site.

Yes, blogging software helps--particularly the long archive and index pages.

But exactly HOW this process works has not been sufficiently addressed. We've been referring people more and more frequently to this diagram.

So, as you see, "seed" content is required to get the HitTailing process going. If you don't have a product, you don't have a product to improve. There needs to be a website and pages there in the first place. Yes, we understand HitTail is a tempting way to "start the build", but you must start the build using your own imagination, expertise, or other keyword suggestion tools, like WordTracker or the inventory suggestion tools.

Get out about 100 seed posts.

And once your site is seeded, HitTail will start issuing suggestions. And you can focus on constantly improving quality, by "answering" the suggestions popping up under the Suggestions tab, as surely as if it were a Suggestion Box! But if your suggestions are not good enough, then maybe it's time to "spiral out" to new concepts, such as I am doing with this post. I have mentioned Edwards Demming, TQM and the Japanese concept of Kaizen plenty. Yet, very little hits based on it. Consequently, this is a post to remind everyone that HitTail isn't merely analytics software. It's part of a website total quality management campaign.

Of all these Wikipedia links, I most suggest reading the entry on Kaizen. Pay attention to the continuous improvement in tandem with a respect for people.

This is why you take HitTail suggestions to build natural search traffic, but ONLY when they make sense in the context of your site, and REALLY DO improve your website. This post is a perfect example. I need to get these keywords into a headline, but I'm not going to waste your time. Now, you know why Japan made a massive economic comeback after WWII, and how these concepts translate directly into website management and online marketing techniques today.