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?

Best Longtail Tool

If you're trying to understand how the best longtail tool for selecting keywords for new website content works, check out this flow chart. We used to promote this flowchart rather heavily on the HitTail site. Unfortunately, it's been played down. But I encourage you to check it out to see how you can begin effective longtail marketing today.

Top SEO Marketing Tools

HitTail is one of the top SEO marketing tools available, especially at the price. Imagine being able to be hand-fed writing suggestion topics for your blog that are specially determined to have the ability to achieve top search position for your website? You might pick up 100 more hits/mo or 10,000 new search hits per month, based on a single blog post or new webpage. Results may vary, and we encourage using traffic esitmator tools such as the AdWorks keyword tool to help you decide which keyword suggestions to use. But this post for example is on the topic Top SEO Marketing Tools, because it was fed as a HitTail suggestion. How long do you think before HitTail itself is on page one for that precise search? Let's watch.

How to use HitTail suggestions

One of our most frequently asked questions at HitTail is "What do I do with these HitTail suggestions?". We created an FAQ on this topic but I'd like to create a list of all the different ways actual HitTail customers use their keyword suggestions.

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.

• Create a new blog post using the suggestion as the title / headline


• Create new pages or articles on your website targeting the suggested keywords (utilize article writing services such as the Content Spooling Network)


• Add the suggested keywords to a Pay Per Click campaign (this is now made easy with HitTail Premium)


• Use the keywords on your advertising or landing page


• Use the keywords in your email newsletters to your readers or customers


• Incorporate the HitTail keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions of existing webpages


• Buy a new website domain using HitTail suggestions


• Use HitTail keywords to determine product suggestions and stock new products in your eCommerce store


• Use keyword suggestions to tag your YouTube videos or del.icio.us bookmarks

We'd love to hear how you use your HitTail keyword suggestions!

Methods of Driving Traffic

This will be one of the most self-referential posts and blatant examples of HitTailing I have done in a long time. Yesterday, someone in South Africa googled on the exact term I used in the headline of this post. HitTail recognized that we were not fully optimized on this term, and issued it as a suggestion. But when I clicked to reproduce the search, I didn't see us on that page--understandable, considering it was a South Africa Google Datacenter that it was probably pulling from. So, what to do? I could just click around. But instead...

Using the free FireFox RankChecker tool from SEOBook, I popped the term into the Keyword field and www.hittail.com in the Domain field and hit Start. Lo-and-behold--RankChecker showed me that we were in the 83rd spot in Google on the term. So, I went to Google and performed the search, and clicked right on page 8 of results, and low-and-behold, there was HitTail! I clicked on the result to see that this page about driving traffic for less (a previously acted upon HitTail suggestion) was the page that was found.

So being that the page that was found was something that was targeting and optimized on a completely different term, imagine what would happen if I actually targeted it. And hence, the writing of this post, and giving out of some of the most competitive SEO-industry-insider knowledge that exists... period! For you see, the new writing suggestion that was issued was the direct result of a post that was made as a result of an old writing suggestion that was acted upon. And thus the iterative process of continual improvement is happening. This is why I talk about TQM so much. The "output" from quality assurance is being fed directly back into the "input" of the production line, which produces more quality assurance data.

Hence, our talk about the snowball effect.

Sites become virtually self-optimizing... but not entirely. The process is getting funneled through at least 2 things: 1) YOU. Quality content won't write itself (or will it?). And 2) Blogging software, because who wants to worry about the fuss of SEO when free, easy publishing systems get like 80% of SEO correct out of the box? And this is one of the best methods of driving traffic to your site--adding new content, based on HitTail suggestions.

And yes, it is a lot of work.

But there is another...

...darker...

...method of driving more traffic to your site.

And that method has been talked about by a few industry insiders, and fewer still who share the secret with public quotes like "I use [HitTail] for my Adwords accounts and they double my other campaigns in every positive way. Double the Clicks, half the CPC, half the overall conversion costs."

Yeah uh, so if you want the benefit of HitTail, the other method of driving traffic to your site is to take the keyword lists generated by HitTail and put them into your AdWords campaigns... because who whouldn't want double the clicks, half the CPC and half the overall conversion costs?

Seems like a no-brainer.

Web News Hits - April 14, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Search Engine Land points out that Google now fills out forms and crawls the results -- potentially opening up material on the so-called "invisible web."

Speaking from the experience of a company that has been bringing visibility to the deep web for years, webmasters should not rely on this service alone. Even if Google does start filling in forms, the results will not be optimized.

Ad Age asks: "Does Your Company Need A Chief Blogger?"

"It's a question marketers are still grappling with years after the first waves of corporate blogging flooded the web. But for better or worse, it seems corporate blogging -- and the title of chief blogger -- is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak all have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers."

PPC Hero asks: "Are You Selling Your Keyword Research Short Because You Have A Poor Research Strategy?"

Somebody at the Search Engine Watch forums has spotted that AdWords Ads are now live on Yahoo...

Here's a useful post from Copyblogger: "Five Lessons From Newspapers to Boost Your Blog's Circulation"

Seth Godin explains the difference between "Catchers and Throwers" in the online marketing world

...and Logic + Emotion presents "The Top 10 Made Up Words Of Web 3.0":

"2. Viruseful.
Viral marketing initiatives that are actually useful.
"Not only did Shave Everywhere make me laugh—I was able to configure and purchase my new electric razor online"

Web News Hits - April 11, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

It's a small business blogging success story, told by Search Engine Land:

"Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going to play gigs and be a studio engineer."

And Tuggle uses HitTail to help him write his blog posts:

"Obviously blog posts can become tiresome, because it's not just a blog post. If all I had to do was write a guitar lesson or story that would be easy. But first I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings. It's a double edged sword. You want to get some good rankings out of the post, but at the same time you have to write good content for people."

Ars Technica examines "Why People Read Blogs":

"The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs."

Search Engine Guide discusses "6 Quick and Easy Accessibility Issues That Make Your Visitors Happy" to accomodate users who access websites through nontraditional means.

Mashable provides a roundup of the latest Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL/Google news -- and explains that when "The Big Four Fight Everyone Else Wins"

Search Engine Journal takes a look at six books on SEO that you might find useful...

ProBlogger advises you how to go "From 10000 to 0 Emails In An Inbox In 24 Hours":

"Over the weekend I decided to get serious about my email situation. I’d been sitting on an inbox with close to 10,000 items in it for months and was feeling more and more stressed by the day.

"I posted on Twitter that I needed to do something about it and then decided to take action. Within 24 hours I had an inbox with no items in it (well momentarily) and have been able to maintain that ever since (OK, so it’s only three days, but it’s been a very busy three days)."

And Search Engine Land reports on a study that indicated that the overwhelming majority of searches are informational in nature:

"A Penn State research study showed that about 80-percent of searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional.

The researchers reviewed over 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users to prove the "the 80/20 rule that 80 percent of the cases can be achieved with these clear-cut methods," said IST assistant professor Jim Jansen."

Broad match not always best for PPC

If you run PPC search marketing campaigns, are you aware of "broad match" functionality? It sounds good in theory for those advertisers who are busy and cannot think of every possible keyword under the sun to add to their PPC campaigns. It allows you essentially to add a wildcard. Come up on all ads that include X or Y, no matter what other keywords are appended afterwards.

Obviously they have not been using HitTail to let their audience do the brainstorming for them! Sure, we are biased and hold strong beliefs in getting very granular about the terms you want to focus on in the long tail. That's why we allow you to export your HitTail suggestions for use in PPC campaigns.

Fortune 1000 marketers in particular should think twice about using broad match for PPC advertising because once you get big enough, then you will probably have to deal with public relations problems at one point or another. However, that doesn't mean you have to pay to make it worse.

When a crisis emerges, new keyword combinations that you may not have expected could suddenly become more popular. That's why it's safer to specify exact search phrases.

Web News Hits - April 9, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 News

The Conversation Agent takes us through the steps of "How A Blog Is Born"

Search Engline Land reports on Flickr's new video feature -- and says it's not quite a YouTube clone

Michael Arrington says he has seen the future of social media -- and it's mobile:

"A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings."

Shoemoney gives us the skinny on "Widget Best Practices In A Google World"

Dosh Dosh suggests that we narrow our focus if we want our message to "stick":

"A persuasive blog post or sales letter argues one point and accentuates it thoroughly with analogies, metaphors, examples and references. Just one point, because too many and you’ll not only lose your own focus but the attention of your audience. You don’t want to distract them from taking action."

Here's a great treasure-trove of links for bloggers: "Matt's Big Blogging Resource List"

Finally, The PPC Book provides us with the "Murphy's Law Of Campaign Management"

New HitTail Live Widget being Tested

Hey baby, wanna see my HitTail?

Would you share the first page of your HitTail Search Hits data with the world?

Well, it used to be that you had to log into your own site (or as Connors) to see how cool and addicting our real-time Search Hit tab in HitTail is. But we wanted to start giving everyone a feel for the “black river of keywords” that exists in any site without logging in.

So, we’re testing this new “HitTail Live” widget on our own site for now—but based on whether people like this feature, we might make it available to the public. First, I’m interested in what you think. So, comment!

This widget it somewhat in the spirit of the “search voyeur” features that used to be built into sites like Excite and AOL Search in years past, where you can have insight to the “search stream”. Lately, this has been supplanted by Google Zeitgeist. But somehow, we still think that viewing the real-time flow in a voyeuristic fashion is still hugely appealing. It’s the same issue as day-after Google Analytics, vs. the viewing the real-time click-stream that makes folks like this blogger continue to use HitTail over other choices. Both have their uses, but as this writer states, there’s just something about watching those hits come in.

So, if you’re interested in using this widget on your website, let us know with comments. It’s not a sure thing. For example, would you actually be OK with SHOWING OTHERS the flow of traffic leading into your site? Is it giving too much away?

Personally, I feel it will help reveal the trends on the Internet that the online marketing community doesn’t want to acknowledge: natural search is king. Paid search (which is indistinguishable from natural search from a referrer perspective), which you can identify by the “lack” of a natural listing, is just way less common than people think. Sure, it can drive traffic, but can it even begin to compete with natural search niche domination?

By showing you this widget, we’re now also showing you a slice of the traffic coming to the HitTail site itself. It’s also a wonderful example of how awesome our filters are. Doing this should by all reason pollute our data with people surfing or referrer links. But it won’t. Think about that. If you click one of those links in the Widget, and surf BACK INTO the HitTail site using a reproduced Google search, shouldn’t you see that you just did that in our widget? Shouldn’t that sort of self-referential referrer loop ruin the data?

In any other tracking system, it would.

And THAT sort of subtlety is why folks like Tatraplan detect something special about HitTail’s particular brand of showing referrers.

And with this new public-facing widget, we think there’s a much easier way to check out HitTail’s coolness, without “logging in as Connors”.

If you agree, and might like one of these for yourself, let us know.

Long Tail Keyword

At yesterday's SEO Super Power Meetup, one of the original beta testers simultaneously praised us for how well HitTail worked, and challenged me on why it works, and why he should trust the suggestions.

The answer needs to be qualified: don't take HitTail suggestions blindly! They have to make sense in the context of your site. But they pretty much always do work. In other words, if you take a suggestion issued by HitTail and put it into the Title field of a new blog post, you're pretty much assured to grab the first page on that term, and generate new qualified traffic.

And it takes something of a leap of faith to understand why--and how we're able to do this at such a low-cost and in real time. We understand that there are other products that give you thousands, or tens-of-thousands of keywords at a single go. But they're much more expensive, and such long lists are mostly suitable for pay-per-click campaigns. But as far as getting writing ideas, lists like that just aren't as good as HitTail.

Why?

A suggestion issued by HitTail means that someone JUST found you on that term, but not on the first couple of pages of results.

So, what does this tell you?

1. You CAN be found on this term.
2. There is at least SOME traffic there.
3. There's a bunch of results ahead of you on that term which for some reason didn't satisfy the searcher.

And these three truths make a HitTail suggestion the best sort of long tail keyword. It's active. You're already associated with it. And sites higher in the results are not satisfying users.

BAM! You have the top position on that term.

It might only amount to 50 visits on that term in the course of an entire year. But that's 50 visits you would probably not have gotten otherwise. And it's traffic on fairly specific, and therefore, uniquely pre-qualified potential customers (prospects).

And of course, if you keep this up over time with many HitTail suggestions, the effect accumulates, and results in compounding returns. The idea is that you're going for complete dominance in your particular market niche, following the most logical, and immediately rewarding path, from a quality-content-expansion point-of-view.

Spread the word!

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.

The Keyword Longtailing Process Illustrated

This is a graphic that needs to be featured a bit more on the HitTail site. What do we mean when we refer to HitTailing? This. What do we mean when we say that HitTailing is only part of a balanced marketing campaign? This. What do we mean when we say that you can't just start out HitTailing and expect it to work without "seed" content on a brand new domain? This. So, whether you call it HitTailing or keyword longtailing, this diagram is for you. Whether you do your own keyword mining from your web log files, or use HitTail as a time-saver, this illustration is for you. We ought to somehow work it into our navigational site graphics as our next step, so that it becomes totally pervasive knowledge to HitTailers.

Seeing The Woman In Red with HitTail

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

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

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

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

Quoting the Digg user and HitTailer, eConsultant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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