An Alternative to Internet Addiction

We at HitTail haven't been blogging as much as we used to, perhaps because we too have fallen victim to the always-on 24/7 culture that has been simultaneously enabling yet paralyzing so many savvy Internet users. Although I do not personally use Twitter or Friendfeed, it is becoming an addiction to some like Robert Scoble. While he was the one mentioned on TechCrunch, I know others who use the service far too much to be healthy. I, for one, am happy just to post occasional updates and link to articles on Facebook. Yet I can tell even that small distraction has reduced the normal amount that I should be blogging.

Of course, we designed HitTail to be a little addictive, since it is one of the few truly real-time (dare I say, useful?) services. We love data, and the ability to access it via the Internet at any time. But we also know it can be addicting and paralyzing to sort through endless reports. That's why we simplified analytics to just a few screens and combined it with a To Do list that you check off as you go, enabling you to act on that intelligence. And then we took it one step further, allowing an alternative way to get your keyword suggestions by RSS or Email so you don't have to constantly log on to the site.

We feel it's important that business tools adapt to our lives, rather than the other way around. So this holiday season, I hope everyone takes their eyes off the screen for a few minutes this time of year and enjoys the rest of what life has to offer. Don't worry. When you want to get your latest Internet info, you can still get it sent to your other addiction -- be it iPhone, Crackberry, G1, Treo, or Xperia.

Blogging for SEO, The Counter-argument

This article about the pitfalls of blogging for SEO contains some nice warnings to people blogging for SEO, such as planning and passion. Their point #3, I watch like a hawk, and pretty much disagree with through 2009. Comments may be commonly nofollow'd, but the original posts are not.

Best Keyword Tool

HitTail is worth checking out if you're looking for the best keyword tool, but it takes a decidedly different philosophical approach to website optimization than other tools. It's based on the premise that on any given website, something is almost working for you. If only you could give it that extra little nudge to push it from, say, 3 pages into Google results to the first page. HitTail examines the traffic on your own site to determine where these sweet spots are using techniques that no one else in the industry uses--period. There's always a few people who say you can get what HitTail is giving you through your own web log files. But the truth is that your log files are going to report the same hits over and over, distracting you with stuff you historically know and should be filtering out by now. HitTail handles this by turning your historical keyword hits as a filter against current keyword hits, making the list that gets shown to you only the new stuff. So even for high traffic sites with tons of traffic from all sources, HitTail is the most capable software at zeroing in on the all-important tiny details. Such a detail may be, this is THE FIRS TIME this particular word combination EVER led to your site, and you're positioning terribly on it in search results, and merely by adding some content to your site about that particular topic, you will be able to catapult yourself onto the first page of results, and pick up several thousand times more traffic on that word combo than you are currently.

Sweet, no?

Paralysis by Analysis

If you are faced with paralysis by analysis through your Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics or other analytics software, and are looking for a clearly actionable to-do path from your data, look no farther than HitTail. Imagine installing one piece of tracking code, and immediately having writing suggestions start to be issued to you. You are never faced with an assault of reports that implies you should know what to do merely by looking at them. HitTail takes a very different philosophy, and that is to assume that you DON'T know what to do with your data. Instead, it explicitly issues writing suggestions for your consideration, with an easy way to "flow" them into your editorial calendar to-do list. From there, you can use whatever search-optimized publishing tool you like to create the content, and watch yourself achieve top-positions in the search results on that term. I’m doing exactly that here, and you’ll see the HitTail blog at the top on paralysis by analysis before long. Imagine being able to write with that level of confidence about grabbing a top-position. In this case, I’m doing the writing directly inside HitTail, having the post publish automatically to Blogger. Bam! In a few days, I’ll do publish a post on the next writing suggestion in my HitTail to-do list, because… I’m not suffering from paralysis by analysis. I know exactly what to do, because my tool feeds me action items and not reports.