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.

I'm Back to Help Drive Traffic through SEO and SEM

It's time for me to come out of hiding and start posting again. Like happens to every prolific blogger occasionally, that pesky thing known as real-life interferes. I've finally got a nice tight grip on the reigns, and can take a few moments to re-engage the world through the HitTail blog, which seems to have only been getting better and better in my absence. Kudos to Valerie, Ambar, Adam and all the other (mostly Connors) team that keeps this thing one of the top blogs in marketing.

OK so enough back-patting. HitTail's momentum continues strong, and we have some very exciting things planned. I've decided to take up my propensity for prolific pontification in the SEO arena that dates back to being the Inktomi moderator in the original Search Engine Forums, and re-engage the blogging and SEO (and now... SEM) community.

Whaaaaaat? SEM?

But Mike, you're the SEO guy. OK well, Gary Beal's persistent message to me about HitTail being an awesome tool for PPC, right up there with SpyFu and WordTracker, has finally gotten through my thick skull, and I now view SEO and SEM as virtually the same thing. Basically, in all things online-marketing, you hedge your bet by using just about every service that you reasonably can that Google provides you. You never know how they're cross-indexing their data from different systems to calculate relevancy, and I think it's important to keep a hand in each of them--AdWords, included. I'm managing about $5K/mo in AdWords campaigns just to keep myself engaged on that front. I need to know that stuff well for...

...well, you'll just have to wait and see.

Until then, I'll tell you exactly HOW I'll be re-engaging the community. Primarily, it will take place here on this blog. But I'll be practicing what I preach in actually ENGAGING IN HITTAILING . So essentially, the headlines of every blog post I make will be constructed based on HitTail suggestions. I'll try to document how well these posts do in driving more traffic to the HitTail website, seizing first-positions in Google results on terms that are actually driving traffic, and the various tweaks I perform here to this Blogger section of the HitTail site itself in optimizing it for search. Contrary to popular wisdom, simply starting with Blogger Classic using the FTP feature to transmit the file into a subdirectory of an existing site is a good start in blogging for traffic (there ARE other approaches). But there are dozens of tiny little tweaks on top of that--many of which apply to all blogging and CMS platforms--that can still be done. We've done a bunch of them, like putting the title tag text in the anchor text of thepermalink . But there are others we have not done, such as tweaking out and promoting the RSS feed of this site for maximum reach in subscriptions and syndication, such as on iGoogle. I'll be covering that stuff.

And finally, I'll just be exercising my writing muscles, because using HitTail for SEO can be tough--only because of the "actually having to write" part. It requires a sort of discipline and getting into the groove that doesn't come easy, and lags off quickly. It's just like going to the gym. It's tough to start, but once you do the adrenaline rush keeps your momentum going day-by-day, but if you stop even for a couple of days... BAM! You're out of the game.

Well real-life took me out of the game for awhile, but in the words of George Castanza, I'm back, baby!

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.

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.

HitTail Hosts SEO SuperPower Meetup Tonight

Just a reminder to everyone in the NYC area that HitTail is hosting a SEO SuperPowers Meetup tonight. The topic is the effect of Ajax and other Web development technologies, such as Silverlight, Apollo, Java, Mobile and others on SEO today and in the future.

Anyone in the neigborhood is welcome to stop by. It starts at 6:30PM tonight at the Connors Communications office in New York City on 7 West 22nd Streeet, between 5th and 6th Avenues. It's the "Spinning Wheel" building--a small entrance. We're on the 7th floor.

Free drinks.

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.

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.

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?

Is Search Dead?

TechMeme over the last few days has picked up stories about the alleged demise of print media. And a SEO/SEM manager from India recently linked to HitTail with a story about the decline of SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing, respectively), in favor of social media optimization (SMO?). He also acknowleged HitTail as the best refuge of search optimizers.

Meanwhile, Viacom is suing Google/YouTube for a billion dollars, 2/3 Google's original purchase price. Some think it's a showdown between old and new media, planned by Google while their publicly capitalized war chest is deep. It's better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later, and force some clarification on copyright laws and fair use. TV Shows are increasingly doing tie-in's with their Web audience. Cast aside any doubt that the very nature of media itself is changing. New lines are being drawn (blurred), and definitions and business models are up in the air.

Chris Anderson appeared to some as the harbinger of doom for the blockbuster hit, with his book, The Long Tail. Declaring the blockbuster dead was great for the book launch, and many were quick to point out the irony of The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 being the all-time weekend earner. But Chris himself was quick to point out, even at the launch itself, which I attended, that he was not predicting the death of big media, but rather a a recalibration. Blockbuster successes may never reach the proportionately high watermark of ages past (when adjusted for inflation and world population growth), and smaller, independently published works will reach a much wider audience.

Chris Anderson would characterize this as the long tail demand curve moving towards its true shape, representing the actual diversity of tastes in the population. And to navigate the formidable choice that exists, we need better "filters". For the past many years, the filter known as Google has reigned supreme. In those same years, the searches built into Amazon and eBay are the unsung hero's of long tail product searches. And today, we see specialized product comparison and opinion searches on the rise, rife with social networking features. The book, The Wisdom of Crowds taught us that sometimes collective wisdom is smarter than any single person, and real-world examples, like Wikipedia is bearing that out. The founder of Wikipedia is now planning a wisdom-of-the-crowd-powered search engine to compete with Google! Isn't that to be trusted more than some anonymous black-boxed relevancy algorithm?

So, is "Search" dead?

Already?

Just as with the premature proclamations of print's demise, so it is with Search. Search has at least evolved into a large centralized, undisputed authority (Google, of course). While not a pseudo-governing committee like ICANN or a decentralized distributed system like DNS, Google has indeed claimed this mantle.

And in social media networking, no one has. Not MySpace. Not eBay. Not Amazon. Not Digg. They're all walled gardens. They're all incomplete ecosystems. And by the very visibility of this global social-search-filter as the big brass ring that every company wants to grab, no one has the surprise advantage that Google enjoyed in its day. So, the chances of someone somehow reigning supreme are very slim. It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out battle the likes of which we haven't seen since the portal wars.

And during all that time, the only truism that will remain is search. Search will be standing in the wings saying "Come back to me. I work so well. And we're making changes to keep pace with the social nature of the Web. Just click 'more' and see."

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.