HitTail is now a PPC Product?

So there you have it. I've been dropping hints for a few days now, but HitTail's premium service for driving down CPC has just been launched... and HitTail is entering into the world of AdWords campaign optimization. HitTail is now a PPC product.

Yes, it's true!

But how can that be? HitTail lands firmly on the free and organic side of search engine optimization. Isn't this some sort of betrayal suddenly releasing features designed to encourage you to plow even more money into pay-per-click? Isn't HitTail--the kooky company that always advocated freedom from PPC--reneging on its word?

The answer is No.

This is the creator of HitTail speaking, and after many months of managing AdWords campaigns, I'm here to tell you that HitTail methodology rocks the AdWords world--to the point where you can get a deal on the AdWords side that rivals PPC--and additionally have the satisfaction of managing campaigns that today's SEM companies can hardly even compete with. In my recent experience, I set up a "longtail" campaign in AdWords, and systematically moved the best words into this campaign, knowing that there was already SOME traffic on these words, but we weren't coming up on the first page of results. The idea with AdWords is to get these awesome longtail keywords WORKING FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY without even having to produce organic content for your site.

And it paid off in a big way... a very big way... a big enough way that me--one of the biggest advocates of better search results through blogging--to now also be an AdWords advocate...

...but only conditionally... on the condition of getting one over on AdWords.

What happens if you take the super-charged keyword lists provided by HitTail, where you know traffic is already occuring on your site, but not on page one, then you plug it into AdWords? The answer is you instantly get page on of search results (albeit in an ad) on words where some determined searchers went many pages in. So you suddenly tap into the exponentially greater number of people who never make it past page one, and a significant portion of these people click on ads. With effective keywords in-hand, instead of just moving them to your To-Do list and allowing them to unacceptably age, put them to work for you right away.

And the actual goal here is to lower your overall cost of acquiring customers (audience, visitors, whatever) by eliminating (at least temporarily), the most tedious and unlikely to occur part of HitTailing--namely, creating new website content. Now we still do encourage new website content as your long-term road to PPC freedom. But until you get that content out there, put the super-charged keyword lists to work for you.

Blogging Software IS a Search Friendly CMS

This post is pure HitTailing. I'm both taking HitTail's writing
suggestions, and telling you one of the best kept secrets in search
engine optimization--blogging software does nearly everything
correctly for SEO, and have created a "just add keywords" environment.
Blogging software IS content management software for the web, which
follows the 80/20 rule. It does 80% of things right for SEO by the
time you've invested 20% of the time as everyone else.

One catch is that the keywords whose traffic you're targeting must be
ordered exactly correctly for where the traffic's actually at, then
turned into a headline. Headlines in particular in blogging software
hold search influence because it also becomes part of the title tag,
URL and links leading back to the page. This alleviates a lot of the
manual work SEO's spend a lot of time fixing in sites broken for search.

After you choose the right keywords to target in your headline, the
only difference in whether you're grab the homepage of Google or not
in short order is how competitive your targeted term is. One way to
ensure that you both receive traffic to be worth your effort is to
choose quality longtail keywords generated by HitTail.

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.

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

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 8, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 News

PPC Hero tells you how to “Manage Your PPC Campaign Like A Shark”:

“I was reading an article about sharks and it got me thinking about PPC management. Sure, most people’s brains may not make that leap, but that’s the way I roll. Sharks have been around for approximately 450 million years. Their survival is not by accident; it is a result of evolutionary instinct combined with aggressive predatory skills.”

Search Engine Land explores errors in mapping online systems.

PPC Discussions asks Adwords to “Please Change These 2 Things”

Mashable provides an early and in-depth look at Google’s application cloud service.

The “shockwaves” caused by this recent New York Times article on blogging is still being felt, as Blogstorm helpfully provides “10 Ways To Prevent Death By Blogging”

Finally, Copyblogger gives advice on how to price your freelance writing work:

“If you go looking for advice on how to price freelance writing work, you’ll find that one thing gets repeated nearly everywhere: don’t lowball yourself. There’s a natural tendency in business to feel like you need every client you can find, and that can often mean settling for a below-market rate in exchange for simply having the work. The standard advice is, “don’t fall into that trap.”

Web News Hits - April 7, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Facebook will be launching their new chat service, ReadWriteWeb reports

The New York Times reports on Yahoo’s new ad system:

“Yahoo said the system, called AMP and still months away from being ready, would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo’s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads on their own sites as well as on Yahoo and on the sites of other publishers in the company’s growing network.”

Meanwhile, Ars Technica has some quibbles with NYT’s recent “blogging yourself to death” article...

...and Marketing Pilgrim also responds to the New York Times article, explaining “Why I’m A Tortoise In a World Of Blogging Hares."

Search Engine Land reports on a study that finds blended search resulting in more clicks for news, images, and video:

“Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, "news" results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. The study's overall findings reinforce a point increasingly being made: marketers need to broaden and optimize their various content types to be found in blended search results.”

Pro Blogger teaches you “How To Target The Right Social Media Sites”

Finally, the SERPzone provides “14 Little-Known Sources of PPC Traffic”

Get Web Hits

Here's an article about HitTail that needs more attention:

Say for example you want to get away from the clutches of PPC advertising, the first thing you should know is how people are finding your website online. Hittail does this, records the frequency, the keywords, the time of the search, the country and much more. In addition in the click of a button, you can have it suggest new terms for your to optimize for your business based on the results gathered from the live statistics.

They also have this other article about Organic SEO and Low Hanging Fruit or PPC, Which is Better?

AdWords

This post is a bold experiment. HitTailing works best with 3 to 5 word combo's. In the case of more obscure 2-word combo's, HitTail works pretty well too, as it did with SEO FAQ. But what about a 1-word search, with a recently made-up word, which happens to also have become competitive in a very short time-frame? Can this post start bringing in natural search traffic on a single word? How does our AdWords campaign, where we're paying for for traffic on this term play in? Will our considerable click-through on our AdWords campaign boost the natural search page, deeming us a relevant site on that topic, as measured by a separate mechanism? Time will tell.

Blog Management

Well, I’m really HitTailing away, and it’s time to talk about blog management. What is the correct ratio between blogging purely about what’s on your mind and in your heart, versus about what you KNOW FOR SURE will generate new traffic and audience to your site? (ala HitTailing)

Is blogging primarily a function to generate traffic (SEO) for some other ultimate purpose at your website (driving sales), or it is a “pure” medium for pontification and soapbox journalism? What if you’re a business and have to balance blogging with all your other corporate considerations?

Quite a dilemma.

A little over a year since HitTail’s inception, we’ve built up our own website, practicing what we preach to a certain extent. As you pursue over my blogging topic headlines, you’ll see that for the most part, I blogged about what I wanted to, and rarely gave a second thought to optimizing my headlines.

But we’re going into promotion mode, and as you can see, virtually every time we HitTail, it works. We’re rapidly becoming one of our own best case studies. We can decide WHAT type of traffic we want, and with little more effort than putting a little article like this, we add 10 to 50 more hits a day to our website, of the most qualified sort.

10 to 50 hits sounds like nothing, right?

But think of yourself at a conference. You’re not a speaker, yet you’re trying to do some business networking. Would you consider yourself lucky if you could hand out your business card to 10 to 50 people every day? How about if those people were actually not at random, and somehow knew to seek you out with some public addressing system?

Pretty good, huh?

Now what if on every day of the conference, you could get someone else to hand out business cards on your behalf, to uniquely pre-qualified prospects? And with each subsequent day, you could add yet another networking employee, and pay them no salary, and never lose your prior people? Until eventually, you have an army handing out cards. Well, that’s the essence of intelligent longtail keyword marketing. It’s cumulative in nature, until you reach the point of diminishing returns, which doesn’t really occur until you’ve saturated a market, written about everything there is to write about in that field, and have reached every person whose ever been in the market. This probably won’t happen to most people until they’re ready to retire. And if you do “reach the end” of your HitTailing activity within one industry or market, you simply attack new markets.

But how does a blogging content expansion strategy dove-tail with your regular website?

First of all, blogging is essentially no different than normal Web publishing. There are plenty of websites that use blogging software as their PRIMARY publishing platform, dispensing with the heavy-duty enterprise platforms, like Vignette or Documentum. Web publishing is Web publishing. Don’t let the enterprise elitists intimidate you. Blogger, TypePad, SquareSpace and WordPress can all be used to manage the blog portion of your existing website, or replace many CMS systems altogether (especially SquareSpace). And more mainstream open source CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla are becoming more blog-like all the time, displaying the search engine-friendly artifacts that litter blogging software.

So no matter your existing website, you can just arbitrarily make a new subdirectory or subdomain, and say “this portion of the website shall be maintained with blogging software!”

It’s a relatively easy matter to match a new blog to the look of your existing website, then start creating new content. This is where HitTailing really comes in, to get the most out of your blog—because it’s time to build audience. But you don’t want just any audience. You want the RIGHT audience.

So, get about 100 initial blog posts out there to stimulate and kick-off the HitTailing procedure. Our own website only existed since June of 2006. But today, we have over 1,360 known pages in our site (search in Google on site:hittail.com), and most of that is generated by blogging software. We’ve seized the top positions on lucrative terms all across the longtail marketing space. We’re gaining the reputation of one of the top keyword tools in the industry. This has been a combination of writing about what we KNOW we want to write about, and writing about what we DISCOVERED that we needed to write about. Both are important. But the later (use of our own product) is what’s resulting in our natural search growth, and continual acquisition of new HitTail users.

The HitTailing process was created precisely for this sort of blog management. There must be a balance struck between what your instincts tell you what to write about…

…and what tools like HitTail tell you to write about.

…and somehow, it almost magically seems to work out. Because isn’t “blog management” a perfect topic for us?

Does HitTail Do Things that Google Analytics Doesn't?

The answer is Yes!

It's yes for at least two reasons: the immediately actionable nature of the information provided, and the immediately viewable real-time nature of the data.

In fact, it's all about immediacy, and spending less on AdWords (or eliminating your need for AdWords altogether).

What if Google Analytics told everybody the specific topics to write about in order to boost their site's natural search engine standings? People would flock off of AdWords in droves. Why pay for something that you can get for free?

In this sense, Google Analytics and HitTail are diametrically opposed to each other. While it's easy enough to pull a "long" list of keywords, or even "top keywords", none of that begins to give you the competitive intelligence that you need for an informed rapid content expansion strategy.

HitTail is like a coach looking over your shoulder as you pull a keyword list out of your analytics software, striking down over 95% of that list based on how it would waste your time to further develop those concepts.

Imagine the time saved!

Yes, given a "long list" of keywords, you could take each one and perform a Google search, seeing whether the term is already working for you or not. If you find your own site in the first page or two of results on that term, you can discount it as a term for further development, based on the fact that it's already working for you.

But as you work your way through this long list of keywords, you will occasionally find terms where the Web searcher must have been extraordinarily determined to find an answer. You know this by looking at how many pages in they must have surfed before they decided to click on you.

This is all very nuanced, and outside the box for most marketers. That's why the arrival of the book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, was so timely. It provides a framework by which marketers can understand collecting multiple valuable pockets of free qualified search traffic.

I'll say that again.

HitTail lets you collect and concentrate FREE veins of search traffic gold, gathering them up until it collectively accounts for more traffic than you are receiving through paid search campaigns. In fact, HitTail forms the foundation of a sustainable, cross-engine online marketing campaign whose effect will last long after you diminish your efforts and stop putting money into it.

So to answer the original question of whether HitTail does things that Google Analytics does not, it's an unqualified Yes! HitTail provides data in such a way that you can easily diversify your online marketing campaigns into "un-paid" natural search.

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.

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.

Ten Candidly Answered Questions About HitTail

There are frequently asked questions that reach our formal FAQ, then there are candidly answered questions (CAQ?) that have no such place in official documentation. This post is of the later sort.

I guess it's like Playboy's 20 questions. But instead of an interviewer, I just wrote the questions myself, based on what I've been asked at infinitum lately. Hopefully, they will help you understand WHY we are doing what we're doing, and how you can benefit, prosper, and hopefully help us out in return.

Q1. I just don't get HitTail or the long tail. It goes against everything I've learned. What's up?

A1. You either get long tail thinking or you don't. If you don't, you probably will eventually, as your friends beat it into you. But it cannot be rushed, and if you're already "king of the hill" in some niche area, then you may resist succumbing to the notion--because it means your competition has openings you can't defend against, and you have to do more work you didn't plan on. If you've "made it" and feel like anything further is a waste of your time, so be it. But like any outside the box thinking, it simply has to come to you in time. Don't rush it. But watching OUR LONG TAIL DEMO has been known to give you a glimpse outside the box.

Q2: Are you attacking the PPC market? Are you declaring war on Google?

A2: We will never put Google out of business by reducing your reliance on AdWords. But any responsible marketer should be thinking about life after AdWords. As our demo states, we have planned HitTailing to be a long term, sustainable and cross-engine approach to search marketing. Thanks to John Battelle, Google is now famous for its ability to arbitrate who gets what business through search. But arbitrage transcends Google, and no matter how things change, HitTailing will still work. HitTailing, and long tail keyword marketing strategies, are generally a broader concept and more universal and long-lived than optimizing PPC campaigns within any particular company's search advertising product offerings. With HitTail, you're permanently improving assets of a company. With PPC campaigns, you're applying vendor-specific temporary pressure on portal-loyal audiences. If you're thinking, say, 10 years into the future, HitTailing is better.

Q3: Doesn't social media like Digg, YouTube and MySpace change search forever? How does HitTail fit in?

A3: HitTail works extremely well with social media. In the case of Digg, there is no better way to see the activity that ensues post-digging better than watching the real-time "Search Hits" tab in HitTail. Because so much social media is about responding to events in real-time, HitTail is uniquely suited to optimizing publicity through social media sites. Social media sites that exist behind a "login" are sometimes a bit more challenging. But as the rules of the game change, HitTail is dedicated to grow and evolve into the most efficient social media optimization tool.

Q4: Does HitTail really work? Where's the proof?

A4: Yes. Yes, it does. We've got the proof, but in accordance to our 100% respect for the privacy of our users, we're not going to tell you... that is unless they tell you first. And there are a few. There's the infamous HitTailer and PPC Manager, Gary Beal, who was exceedingly generous with his data in the earliest days. But as time goes on, they're coming out of the woodwork. Within just the past week, Vlad of My Affiliate Journey disclosed a 500% increase in traffic and Antonio Howell, M.D. revealed a tripling of traffic from taking just one HitTail suggestion. These are just a few examples of people who published proof of it working. Connors itself has disclosed two examples (one, two) of practicing what it preaches. Just search on add traffic or best pr firm in nyc. Yep, we did a 2-word competitive combo just to flex our muscle. Unlike other companies that have to beg and steal to compile their success stories--especially when the use of the product produces secret competitive advantage--HitTail success stories are only a Google search away. I'd like to say they're unsolicited. But they're not. And that should make it all the MORE impressive. If this doesn't convince you of HitTail's effectiveness, both as a tool, and as a new online marketing mindset, just stay tuned as your competitors take up HitTailing.

Q5: Is this REALLY just a blogging thing? What about regular websites built with CMS and software like DreamWeaver and FrontPage?

A5: OK, if you have all day, I'll tell you why blogging software is just so awesome for HitTail and frees you from most of the time-consuming and confusing "SEO" issues. But the short answer is in the long pages that blogging software produces, in the form of archive and index pages. Blog software takes all your posts from a week or a month and mixes them up all onto one page, producing an click-magnet for infinite word combinations that you never anticipated, but are directly relevant to your subject-matter. This also answers the alternative question of "why should I care about keywords that are already leading to my site?" Simply put, the collective guessing power of the world dwarfs your ability to brainstorm, and is more accurate and customized to your site than WordTracker or the keyword inventory tools. And you can't match pages-to-guesses without long-page versions of your content. HitTail simply works BETTER with blogs. Deal with it. If you want site-management software with all the same advantages, try SquareSpace.

Q6: What about this feature or that? It's the one "must-have" feature for HitTail!

A6: Yes, yes. We know all about conversion tracking, click-path analysis, raw hit counts, who's online now/visitor geography, and all the rest of that fascinating distractions that complicate the call-to-action in "real" analytics software. That's not us. Whose got the time? We just want to let marketers grow their natural search traffic in the most efficient way possible. More broadly, we're letting the entire blogging world to view their often misunderstood initial referrer hits in real time, and extract writing suggestions from those. Paid HitTailers can see how they're doing with their long-tail growth-over-time metric. We're conceding all those other goodies to Omniture, Google Analytics, WebTrends, and the multitude of free ones, like AwStats.

Q7: Can't everything you do in HitTail be done for free in AwStats?

Q8: Nope. HitTail does more, and requires less time. AND HitTail basic is free too. Those folks who have been doing long-tail keyword mining of their log files for years, each have their own home-spun method of pairing down enormous keyword lists to figure out the best ones to target. They like to poo-poo HitTail, but here's what they don't know. HitTail employees patent-pending "keywords forever" technology that keeps you from ever considering the same term twice. That alone is a huge time-saver, but combine that with our rapid-list-pairing technology and emailed suggestions or RSS feed to fit into your busy day, and you have higher quality keyword suggestions than the technical elite, at a lower cost and with less invested time. So while technically, you COULD do home-spun HitTail alternatives, who would want to? Even the heavy-hitters tech guys like Jack Humphrey and JC Allen who wanted to develop their own killer long tail keyword app themselves, decided not to because HitTail already exists. Thanks guys. You're the best. Let me know if you need anything from me.

Q9: Natural search marketing products can never hit the mainstream, because any attempt to manipulate search will result in algorithm changes that break their effectiveness, right?

A9: The basic presumptions built into Google's algorithm, code-named BackRub, are as true today as they were in the halls and ad hoc servers at Stanford. With all the alg-tweaks they've done over the years, the premises are still 80% the same. We see a good 5 years of life left before those underpinning presumptions change, and by that time, we will be well ahead of the curve... again. So, no worries there. This all is based on the fact that something's always "nearly working" for you, and this shows up in tracking data. All you need to know is one factor, which when tweaked, can push these "almost performing" pages over the edge. HitTail is determined to always know that key factor and offer the right advice. Today, the advice we dispense is

Work HitTail writing suggestions into the headline of your blog post, while maintaining word order as close as reasonably possible. Use the rest of the page exercising the lost art of writing well. Ignore the dense advice of the keyword density nits.

Tomorrow, our advice may be something different. We will let you know. But in the meantime, marketing departments worldwide can carry out natural search optimization campaigns with the same clarity of investment and ROI as PPC.

Q10: Free? Why? What do you get out of it?

A10: Well, we're not entirely free. Think of it as guilt-ware. We plan on providing services to the entire blogging world. Think about that for a moment. The ENTIRE blogging world.

Google couldn't even provide Google Analytics to the "first takers" without going down. We plan on doing even more than that, so saying we're ambitious is an understatement. And we appreciate the advocacy that our HitTail supporters provide, and don't want to piss off even a single user. As a result, we get A LOT of such advocacy.

We've struck a chord with natural search campaigns in mainstream marketing, and we want it to resonate. That's why we keep our free version so feature-enabled. We CAN provide free natural-search-improving service to the world, so we do. The one caveat is that sites receiving over 100,000 uniques/mo. must pay or get turned off, because that's where it starts to reduce our ability to service our freemium customers. It just makes sense. Those who SUCCEED by following our advice pay us--but not until they're successful, and only if they want to keep using us.

Think how enlightened we are. And THAT'S from a public relations company! Those low-volume users who wish to pay receive enhanced features. Those who don't pay, receive a full-featured product. Then, we simply start to guilt-trip those getting it for free into promoting us instead--or eventually pay.

Just like NPR. Kapish?

Blogging Software as AdWords Alternative

I was recently interviewed by Craig Crossman's and Carey Holzman's Computer America, the United States' longest running nationally syndicated talk radio show about computers. In HitTail interviews such as these, there is always that moment where the interviewer absorbs the fact that we're heavily advocating blogging software for effectiveness in natural search, sometimes to their dismay. People with pre-existing websites, that perhaps pre-dates the blogging craze, justifiably don't want to be left out of the HitTailing fun. But for natural search to be mainstreamed as a marketing tool, it needs to be accessible to the average marketing Jane or Joe. And blogging software provides that simplification.

So is the use of blogging software really so important for HitTailing?

Yes, but only if you want the amazingly stunning sort of results that are reported around the Internet.

The field we know of as search engine optimization, or SEO, is about technical and fundamental fixes to websites, no matter what platform they were published with, be it FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or any one of hundreds of web publishing platforms. It's tough work. And doing the big natural search fix takes what more marketers have got, and they often get intimidated enough by the experience to flock to pay-per-click, or PPC, services like Google AdWords. But what is not commonly known is just how staggeringly effective blogging software is for search. Given a publishing platform that's already naturally predisposed to doing well in search, the challenge really just becomes choosing the correct writing topics that are poised to do well. Enter HitTail.

Recently, I've been explaining HitTailing as analogous to those quarter-drop machines in ski-ball joints. You know, the ones where you choose where to drop the quarter based on how close the already existing piles of quarters are to falling over the edge. The rakes move back and forth, nudging the quarters over the precipice, and all you need do is drop a quarter and steer it down the chute, landing between gyrating rake and pile of quarters in the hopes of knocking a nice little pile over to the edge.

Well, that's HitTail. Every website is exactly like these quarter-drop machines, with keywords ready to perform on your site. All you need to do is drop the right blog post into your site, launching that page to the top of search, and allowing already existing piles of searchers on that term to fall into your site (instead of your competitors').

But then, why blogging software? There are tons of reasons. But primarily, because every page you publish is an opportunity to target another term, and sustaining this over time is your best way of getting the snowball effect to occur. Adding new pages is a much better method than going back and optimizing old pages, and blogging software is the perfect friction-free publishing platform to push out lots of pages.

But there are more reasons, such as the long archive pages where blogs compile your weekly or monthly posts onto one page. Think about the random combinations of words that are possible when multiple diverse blog posts run on one page. Word combinations are occurring on your blog archive pages that are occurring nowhere else on the Web. And the determined searcher who is unsatisfied with the top-10 results on those terms will keep searching, until they find you.

And when they do, you had better be listening.

Because if you're not, the next visitor will have to go through the same highly unlikely series of page-loads and click decisions to find you. But now that you know that you CAN and indeed SHOULD be found on that new word combination, there's no reason to make people hunt for you. When you work that exact word combination into your blog headline, the blogging software is SO WELL OPTIMIZED for search, that that's generally all you have to do to get the next visitor who searches on that term. Keep this up over time, and you get the idea.

This is the exact same thing as turning your entire website into a writing topic suggestion box.

But most analytics software doesn't think of it as a suggestion box. Instead, they show you the useless top-10 lists of what keywords are mostly leading people to your site. Well, why should you care about what is already working for you, if your goal is to make more relevant terms lead to your site? You're not even interested in the super-long list of keywords that some analytics packages can let you pull, because what would your basis be for evaluating which keywords are on the verge of working for you?

Sure, many SEO's do this manually, but keyword research is a labor-intensive process. And you're always looking at the same keywords over and over. All keywords that you've ever considered should work as a filter for all keywords you might consider in the future, so you're always looking at something new. We call that Keywords Forever, and it's a feature of our imminent premium service.

So, CAN HitTail work with other Web publishing platforms? Sure, but the level of suggestions will be much lower, because they don't have long archive pages. The level of hits will be lower, because not every page gets a search-friendly URL, matching title tag and headline, and a bunch of automatic perfect internal link-structure. Blogging software has been doing most of those tricks since they came onto the scene in the early days when Blogger was owned by Pyra. And those little SEO optimizations that weren't there, got perfected when MovableType, and later Word Press came onto the scene. And the final item to seal the deal is how whenever you post a blog entry, it pings a bunch of news crawler-alert systems, in something very akin to Search Engine Submits of yesteryear.

So you see, the case for using blogging software as a means of getting used to natural search as a mainstream form of marketing is very strong. With the right perspective and the right tools, it can be as easy to manage a natural search campaign as a PPC campaign.

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.