I don't know if I'd go as far as saying that, but here's an article that does. In short, it equates the walls-of-data and charts to passive "oh, isn't that nice" TV watching, as opposed to "here's what you should do to improve things" the way other software, such as, ohhhhh, I don't know... HitTail does!
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.
If you are faced with paralysis by analysis through your Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics or other analytics software, and are looking for a clearly actionable to-do path from your data, look no farther than HitTail. Imagine installing one piece of tracking code, and immediately having writing suggestions start to be issued to you. You are never faced with an assault of reports that implies you should know what to do merely by looking at them. HitTail takes a very different philosophy, and that is to assume that you DON'T know what to do with your data. Instead, it explicitly issues writing suggestions for your consideration, with an easy way to "flow" them into your editorial calendar to-do list. From there, you can use whatever search-optimized publishing tool you like to create the content, and watch yourself achieve top-positions in the search results on that term. I’m doing exactly that here, and you’ll see the HitTail blog at the top on paralysis by analysis before long. Imagine being able to write with that level of confidence about grabbing a top-position. In this case, I’m doing the writing directly inside HitTail, having the post publish automatically to Blogger. Bam! In a few days, I’ll do publish a post on the next writing suggestion in my HitTail to-do list, because… I’m not suffering from paralysis by analysis. I know exactly what to do, because my tool feeds me action items and not reports.
Web News Hits - April 4 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links
Should you blog for business or pleasure? Copyblogger attempts to answer the question. Business Wire reports how Craigslist’s income in 2008 could be as high as $100 million:
“Craigslist, the free-classifieds Web site that has become a global phenomenon, is expected to generate $81 million in revenue in 2008 and could easily top $100 million with a few simple changes that might improve the service, a new report shows.
The report from Classified Intelligence, the leading consultants in the classified advertising field, estimated growth of 47 percent over $55 million in revenue for Craigslist in 2007.”
“So, I am not sure why Google is testing this implementation? Maybe it is because they are finding the universal search user interface is confusing the searcher?”
Problogger presents an excellent post on “A Strategy For Building Niche Focused Blog Networks”
Search Engine Watch continues their look at the evolution and future of social search:
“The social graph has brought new meaning to social search and marketing. Your contacts and friends are certainly one source of search relevance and subject authority, but are they the best source?”
More “couch potatoes” are parked in front of their PC than TV, Ars Technica reports. An interesting tidbit:
“Shorter clips, however, are still the most popular things to watch online. Five times as many viewers watch clips of shows as those who watch full episodes, said the report, with 75 percent of the clip content originating from broadcast or cable TV content.”
Finally, Lifehacker looks at the “Five Best Instant Messengers” from a variety of applications and services, from web-based chat to desktop clients.
Web News Hits - March 31, 2008 - Your Daily Source Of Web 2.0 Links
Hello and welcome to HitTail's "Web News Hits" where we provide you with a selection of some of the most interesting posts on Web 2.0 and online marketing. Topics of interest to "Web News Hits" include:
* Blogging * Optimizing your site for search engines using targeted keywords (search engine optimization or "SEO") * Social media like Facebook, Digg, Wikipedia, and YouTube * Content management * eCommerce systems * General online news and views
I hope you will join us every day for this new feature. And if you have any suggestions for articles and posts we might have missed -- let us know!
Yahoo has launched a new online magazine for women: Shine. Is the launch of Shine an attempt -- among other cool features and services that have cropped up as of late -- by the company to boost their value in the wake of the Microsoft takeover bid?
"For example, SEO for a funeral directors? Or kitchen fitters? I can think of a few funny videos that would go great on a funeral site, but I don’t think the client would find them suitable!"
"Many brands are wary of exposing themselves on social media sites, but as anyone who's been involved in social media for more than five minutes knows, they're too late. Their brands are already exposed, and the community is talking about them, whether they choose to get involved or not. Rather than trying to avoid the conversation, brand marketers need to create a strategy to engage online influencers and social media users who have the power to make or break their brand."
Facebook in China? David Snyder, guest-blogging for Marketing Pilgrim, has a report.
HitTailing to get more website traffic is a hit-or-miss proposition sometimes. This blog post is to discuss a miss.
Not everything you do in real life can be an automatic success. Sometimes, it takes a few tries. HitTail is analogous to entrepreneurial success in real-life. You will have your successes, and you will have your failures. But on the whole, your successes should outweigh your failures, because you learn from the past, do more of what worked for you, less of what didn't, and play to your strengths.
You selectively concentrate your successes, and make your failures work for you the best you can.
Case-in-point, we hit a home-run with the concept of "Top PR firms in NYC". We get tons of hits every day on this concept. There are apparently a lot of people interested in seeking out the best folks in one of the best branches of marketing in one of the best cities in the world. Go figure. And no one "owned" this 5-word long tail phrase, where significant amounts of highly qualified traffic exists, but it flies beneath the radar of keyword inventory tools, such as those built into AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
But conversely, I HitTailed the concept "blog marketing", and we didn't show up until 23 pages in!
The likes of people who kept us buried on that terms is just about every marketer on the planet who advocates the use of blogs for marketing. In other words, I stepped into a competitive term! Though it's not as competitive as "second mortgage". Still.
Even with a mildly competitive term, HitTailing is still worth it. The fact remains that we deliberately penetrate the search engine results, no matter how buried (it could be worse than 23 pages). And the article is being added to a long-page-version of our content (magically generated by blogging software), letting the term "blog marketing" combine itself at random with other related topics that I have blogged about during the course of August, 2007. I could be getting issued suggestions on "corporate blog marketing" or "blog marketing consultants" or some such.
So even though viewed on its own, it was a failed HitTail attempt, I am still optimistic that on the whole, it will lead to future successes.
So, these are a few words about our high-end product, and the history of HitTail. As many know, HitTail is the brainchild of the public relations firm, Connors Communications, founded by Connie Connors, one of the folks who helped build-up some of the Dot Com giants, such as Amazon.com and Priceline.
Unlike other PR firms who have entered the online space, in a possibly overzealous fashion, and perhaps even risked their reputation with kitschy, manipulative stunts, such as disingenuous blogging, Connors has chosen a path less traveled, but we think infinitely more rewarding. We have actually become one of the new generation of disruptive, game-changing companies that we endeavor to promote online. In other words, we don't only talk the talk, but we walk the walk.
We created HitTail.
So, what do we do with this incredible audience we're accumulating, as we become highly recognized in marketing circles around the world? Why, we use it to win you as our next client, of course. Our brand of SEO is very high-end, really only making sense for folks who already have $100K AdWords campaigns, but would like their natural search piece of the pie.
How does this relate to HitTail?
As more and more HitTailers are coming to discover, this beloved Web 2.0 long tail writing topic suggestion tool is actually an "extraction" from our larger product, which Connors has been using with high-end client engagements for some years now—where budgets of $100K/mo are traditionally being poured into AdWords, and they're looking for a more sensible approach.
And now we're ready to describe this previously tightly-guarded secret to the world.
We named it Connors ABCs.
Why ABCs? We think it describes how we view ourselves as the new fundamental building blocks of a new form of online marketing—where you fix your website, without scrapping and rebuilding everything you've got. Yes, it's SEO (search engine optimization), but brought to a whole new level, through a non-intrusive presentation layer that lets us remix websites like DJs remix music.
We describe this complex system of re-working and re-publishing data you already have so often, that it wore us down.
Hopefully using this demo, the enthusiasm that starts to build once we start to talk with you can become infectious, and you can pass the word along in your company. But fair warning! As Mike Crowl stated in his review of our presentation:
It assumes that you’re intelligent and can keep up with both audio and visual input at the same time, so that while your ear is listening to one part of the message your eye is either getting an alternative picture of that message or something additional.
So even if you don't have a budget of $25,000/mo to spend, Mike Crowl suggests that you check out the demo, because:
I haven’t seen one as slick and mind-catching in a while.
Did you know that HitTail was "extracted" from a high-end system sold by Connors Communications to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies? This is a special preview to HitTail users of this service.
Although it's probably above the price-range of most HitTailers, I ask you to watch the demo and consider whether you know someone who might be interested. Good-will like this is what helps keep quality free services free. So, if you know someone this might be of interest to, please forward it to them. We hope for introductions to larger type companies who "feel the pain" of not getting the natural search traffic that is their due. There are tons of companies shoveling money into pay-per-click campaigns, who should be taking measures to own their own fate.
Most mentions of HitTail receive the honor of being mentioned on my Everyone Loves HitTail blog. But once in awhile, there's a mention that I feel compelled to call out here. We don't go calling HitTail an SEO service, because we like to avoid the confusion that exists in the field. Instead, we tell people just to use an already search-optimized publishing system (such as blogging software or SquareSpace). But every once in awhile an SEO top-tools list appears with us on it, which we just have to share, as is the case on Esoteric Lab's Search Engine Optimization 2.0 site.
I guess we're working our way up to #1, and judging by the amazing response to our "charter member" promotion that lasted through April 30th, we're on our way.
So my question for the HitTailers of the world is this:
Does anyone want to step up and name us the single most innovative and important thing to do to your site in 2007? You'll be in good company, because BusinessWeek sort of already did. But we're looking for genuine, from the trenches quotes.
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.
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.
What does the search on your name produce? And how does that relate to the story of King Solomon's Wisdom? And how does that relate to why HitTail is awesome for the SEO industry, although not everyone sees it that way?
This and more, I will answer in this post.
Everyone performs vanity searches on one's own name, occasionally. And once in awhile, a Website owner or marketer will use a person's name in a piece of content either to get that person's attention, or to try to intercept search traffic on that person's name. When the publisher is a search engine optimizer, it's fair to say that they're trying to own a little piece of YOUR reputation. So beware! As HitTail rockets in popularity, and the mainstream marketing world realizes that TypePad, WordPress, SquareSpace and Blogger are their ticket to professional-level optimization, merely by adding HitTail, some of the SEOs come out of the woodwork seeing this as a threat, instead of the groundswell of opportunity for the SEO industry that it is.
Let me explain.
HitTail takes advantage of the fact that blogging software is so enormously tweaked-out optimized out of the box, that mainstream marketing can get into the SEO game much more easily than ages past. The intimidation is removed, and you are less reliant on overpriced consultants to get into the game. Some blogging software packages are free, and HitTail is free. It's a powerful combo.
BUT all this is allowing is mainstream marketing to get into the game. It doesn't make them experts. And some rumors are going around that tiny tweaks to these blogging software configurations can result in as much as a 20% gain in traffic.
While no one walks away from 20% more traffic, isn't it true that SEO's are quite capable of producing 1000% (or more) gains in traffic by those now-industry-standard practices of making sites have search friendly URLs and a sitemap, thereby taking previously invisible sites out of the invisible web? 1000% gains have been reduced to 20% gains? And the work was changing 5 lines of code in a blogging configuration? And people are bragging?
The real story here is that SEO'ing a TypePad site could ONLY result in a 20% gain in traffic.
But that doesn't change the fact that most sites out there are deployed on platforms that are not search optimized, and there is plenty of business to go around there, fixing it.
And most marketing people are scared into paralysis at the thought of blogging and joining the online discussion, so there is plenty of business to go around there, setup, training, and blogging on their behalf until they get with the program.
And even when they are blogging on their own, there are still those template tweaks that get you incrementally more traffic, and all the social media manipulation where you attempt to get "homepage'd" by the likes of Digg and Netscape. So, there's plenty of business there.
And once someone lands on your site, there's many things that can go wrong, preventing the conversion. This is the world of multivariate testing and A/B switch testing. And there's plenty of business there.
So, for the life of me, I can't figure out why a certain brand of SEO gets so nervous about the idea of just any marketing Joe being able to carry out a natural search marketing campaign the same way they could an AdWords campaign these days, using the right PPC and bid management tools. The tools have gotten so good, that even busy media buyers could manage a couple of campaigns on the side. HitTail is exactly that, but on the organic search side.
And as opposed to seeing this as a threat, today's SEO's (and most do) should see this as a validation of their premise, and a vindication of arguments they've been making for years. Google gives it away for free to those who get it so they can charge those who don't.
So what if a larger set of people are being sorted into the group that get it? So what if any marketing Jane or Joe can now get into the natural search game? You weren't going to win these people as $5K/mo. clients anyway. They're just getting their feet wet in the shallow end of the pool. And they have real marketing jobs, with diverse responsibilities, including events, tradeshows, brochures, telemarketing, business development, video production, and appeasing the company officers. They're NOT going to be the ones configuring the blogging software or carrying out a URL rewrite project in Apache.
So don't worry.
This is where I invoke a biblical story of King Solomon. Two women come before King Solomon with a baby, disputing who the real mother is. Solomon says to resolve the dispute, simply cut the baby in two, giving each woman half, at which time the real mother steps forward and says "NO!" Let the other woman have the baby, at which the King knows who the real mother is.
I tell this story of Solomon to anyone who accuses HitTail of oversimplifying the SEO challenges in this day and age. King Solomon wasn't stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. And in this case, I'm blowing the lid of of one of SEO's most closely guarded secrets so that the mainstream marketing community can get in on the game.
And this doesn't threaten REAL SEO's.
That's right.
I'm saying that the less-skilled SEO's think I'm saying "cut the baby". But I'm not. I'm upping the ante and increasing the size of the pot.
In popularizing HitTail and long tail keyword targeting through blogging software, I am mainstreaming the entire field of SEO, which no matter how much business you think you're getting today, is nothing compared to the approximately $5 - $10 billion slice of the pie that's going mostly to PPC campaigns and AdWords (keyword media buying vs. banner buying).
And it's going to be A LOT larger in the coming years. SEO will either grow proportionately, shrink or grow as an overall percentage. Giving SEO a larger piece of the pie will require a re-calibration, of which HitTail plays a fundamential role.
This re-calibration will have a much larger portion of marketing budgets going to SEO than does currently today. But to make such a re-calibration occur, many people need to be aware of WHAT SEO IS, and the benefit that natural search optimization can provide. It's groundswell. We need PULL so SEOs can spend less time pushing.
And there's no surer way to make mainstream groundswell than letting the mainstream get a taste of natural search optimization themselves.
And even then, we have to deal with the concept of website optimization overshadowing search engine optimization, as I've written about in my recent Media Post article.
Search Engine Strategies starts today. I'll be in attendance at the conference on Thursday, but in town all week. If anyone wants chat about HitTail while you're in town, just email hittail at connors dot com, and we can sync up on what evening events we're attending.
NOTE: I notice a lot of traffic coming into this article from StumbleUpon. Since writing this article, I've changed the targeted keywords of HitTail from "long tail" to "keyword tool". So, read the article below in that light.
Before I joined Connors, and before HitTail, my notoriety in the SEO community came from one thing: a systematic and public demonstration of working a website up to the top of search results across all search engines for a competitive 2-word combination. This was back in 1999, before it was such a highly sought-after talent.
I'm doing it again with a client I can talk publicly about, because that client is ourselves (HitTail). I will tell you about the first, back in 1999. Then, I will tell you about today.
The phrase back then was multimedia software, and this pitted me against the likes of Apple, Macromedia, Quark, ULead, Diamond and others. It's also as MP3s were on the rise, and the definition of multimedia was shifting. The term was difficult to target, to say the least.
I conducted this demonstration at JimWorld's Virtual Promote, a.k.a. SearchEngineForums.com. It was the first of it's kind, and is still going on today. Most SEO's were secretive with their higher-end techniques. But I laid it all out, and went as far as spelling out how internal link structure was best achieved with a series of pages with previous/next arrows linking them up. It wasn't long after that that Moveable Type, and later TypePad, started doing exactly that.
And right there in front of everyone's eyes, I raised Scala Multimedia to the top of the SERPs in AltaVista, Lycos, Inktomi, DirectHit, InfoSeek, and all the other engines that had their own unique separate databases at the time. Think about that. I was using sustainable long-term, cross-engine techniques back then that have lasted right up to this day. The results survived the switch-over to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. But I didn't stay at Scala to maintain these stats. None-the-less, if you check, you'll see they're still on the first page of Google and MSN after all these years (about 7).
This is when I discovered there were two-fronts on which to attack keyword strategy. First, is the aforementioned ever-so-sexy benchmark keywords. They're what everyone KNOWS people are searching on, and for which you MUST come up high. They often include the company's name, the name of the products, and the keywords that are obviously related to the industry.
The second type of keywords are what are coming to be known as "long tail keywords". Back then, I simply knew them as "actuals". You can guess the benchmark keywords, but you can never guess the actuals. The collective guessing-power of the world dwarfed any groups ability to brainstorm all the keywords that are important. But likewise, ignoring the underperforming, but promising keywords--actuals that were not positioned well--was leaving money on the table.
And so nearly 8 years later, the concept of optimizing the actual keywords leading to your site (albeit underperforming) has finally come of age. And it's getting associated with the economic concept called the long tail, as it is being popularized by Chris Anderson's book of the same name.
Now, what's the keyword I need to target today in order to find our audience?
Long Tail ??? !!!
A term that's being targeted across the blogosphere? A term that's used in the title of a best-selling book? A term that's suddenly in a hailstorm of competitive chatter? Granted, it's not a keyword like mortgages or Brittany Spears. But it is competitive none-the-less, and much more similar to the type of challenges faced by businesses across the world.
Well, we're not at the top of Google for longtail or long tail yet. But we're at the top of page 2 of results for both terms. That's from-scratch, in under 10 months. The site has a Google PageRank of 6. Combined with all the buzz that surrounds HitTail, these are strong indicators that we'll be on the first page of results before long.
And we will have again demonstrated Connors Communications' ability to systematically target, and work to the top of natural search results, difficult keywords.
And this is with little-to-none link building. Did we link bait? Well, you be the judge. More importantly, we wrote well on the topic. We made a viral video. We chose the correct publishing platforms (for our own sites).
So much for targeted benchmark keywords that are critical to the company. But what about all the rest of those keywords that matter too? How about systematically working ALL keywords that are both important to a company AND possess search traffic to the top of natural results?
Well, that's not merely a key part of my offerings.
But, we also made HitTail so that the world can do it too. And don't forget to check out yesterday's post about the XML transformation SEO capabilities. We've got the big guns.
In a recent post, which was a debate between business writer Seth Godin and Solomon Rothman of WebProNews, I noted that depending on how your TypePad blog is set up, you don't have to do many things to ensure your site works well for search engines. I just started a TypePad blog today, and don't think I will customize the template AT ALL as an experiment.
But I said that no blog is secret these days. I see that when you set up a TypePad blog, you have a choice of publicizing it or not. I chose to publicize it. But I FURTHER had to go into the Weblogs/Publicity tab and put a check next to Weblogs and blo.gs. This will ensure that every time that I post, it pings the blogosphere. Together with TypePad's built-in optimization, this should be enough. I think I'll even resist the temptation to use Pingoat or Ping-o-matic in order to control the variables when I figure where to attribute success.
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.
Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Combine
With the launch of the HitTail premium service by a New York public relations firm, there is increasing question as to "what is PR?" and "what is SEO?" Are either of them still relevant in the face of growing social networking technology? Or do they all get mixed together and blended into something new?
The answer is yes. They all get mixed together and blended into something new.
But within this new space, there are silos of expertise that look very similar to the old disciplines. Skilled communicators are still in the business of influencing the influencers. Something like yesterday's PR professionals still must reach out to carefully chosen individuals so that a message can be efficiently amplified, without having to astroturf every blog in that space. Human relationships, and the artful skill of pitching a story are still important.
But in this new landscape, there are also blogs run by the client, turning the client INTO part of the media. At Connors Communications, our clients are regularly solicited by publications such as The New York Times to provide quotes for THEIR stories. When a company publishes its own authoritative blog in a market, it becomes reverse pervasive and persistent pitching.
Yet, this still is not enough for the new breed of combined PR and SEO.
There is the quick fix to websites who are not leveraging their database assets to their fullest extent. It takes technical skill and special projects to do this. It's different from what most of the marketing world thinks of as search engine optimization. Rearranging title tags and making the URLs search friendly are just sort of background projects these days, that should be assumed. Leveraging a website usually concerns making it 10 to 100 times larger than it was in terms of actual pages. Each new page is perfectly justified and works within the context of the site. It makes the site maybe 10 to 100 times more effective in natural search. It's a sustainable, long-term cross-engine strategy. And it's about releasing and making visible as much potential website content that was previously un-leveraged.
But that's still not all.
Public relations is often concerned with strategic communications, helping to change and reposition the very companies they serve, putting them in the path of the best customers and the most opportunities. But on the SEO side, there are analogies, especially with the alleged demise of print media. It is possible to revisit the very theory of long-established businesses, with an eye towards the great game of grabbing eyeballs, no matter the media. With that perspective, it's easy to imagine how SEO is really a much broader field of "media attention optimization". There is print media, TV, radio, social media websites, and a host more.
Could it be that search engine optimization combines with public relations to form a discipline of "general public compliance?"
Yep, that's it.
If you're interested in being a client of a company that not only thinks this way, but creates applications like HitTail merely to demonstrate its competence, then start a discussion with us today.
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?
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.
What's a Great Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Firm to Call Itself?
Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, made many interesting points about how search is a response to "choice" in society at large busting at the seems. It used to be you could only buy food from your corner grocery store. Now, you can buy perishables from all over the country (and world, if not for import laws).
For example, if you were to make a menu of every food available in the world, you would hardly be able to fit every item on a menu. Menus would be the size of phone-books, and many foods would have to be listed under multiple categories. This is why the science of categorizing things into neat little boxes (ontology) is switching over to a meta-tagging model, where items can be in multiple categories. Paper catalogs in this model would be one sample "output layer" from a much richer and robust back end database.
This is why you almost never hear of the Yahoo human edited directory anymore, but "googling" is a daily occurrence in many peoples' lives.
Reaching the point where old categorizing systems bust at the seams is information overload, and is a big part of what's fueling the keyword search movement. Say, you try to keep the theoretical ever-growing-menu of the world's food in use. There reaches a point where there's just so much information and variations in there, that it's easier to just type a few words into a box, and hit search than to deal with the phonebook-sized paper menu. This overload, and corresponding laziness (path of least resistance) is what's ensuring that search has a critical role in our information navigating future.
This also lays the foundation for the greatest game of our time: the competition over natural search hits. We will be living in a Top-10 world for some time. And the battle to be one of those 10 listings on any given keyword phrase is the glorious battle of our time. Desperation to get on that page the easy way has fueled the Google AdWords search marketing phenomenon. But as marketers get more savvy, they're going to realize that an investment in better information organizational technologies will future-proof their natural search endeavors.
Huh?
All I'm saying is that what we know today as SEO is a better investment than pure advertising, because it overall improves your company. It actually is possible to do SEO work correctly, so that the results will benefit you long into the future. It's possible to steer very clear of the occasional snake oil salesmen and charlatans that occupy this space (not everyone!!!), and focus rather on an "information science-y" approach that lets you manipulate and leverage your information assets en masse. It's like moving icebergs from your fingertips. There's a lot of data transformations and stylizing involved.
The way this works is far too much for a blog post. Suffice to say, ensuring that enough data and relationships exists in your back-end database is a big part, as is ensuring that you have more than one way to publish this data. Your publishing method should have LOTS of flexibility. We call the process of leveraging your back end database in innovative new ways "Slice and Dice".
In fact, we call Connors Communications' ability to output from almost anyone's back end database with pages perfectly well optimized for search, as the Slice and Dice Presentation Layer (SDPL).
And yes, this is coming from a public relations firm.
And yes, we realize we have gone so far beyond other public relations firms, and even search engine optimization firms, that we have to come up with a new name for what we do. "Public relations" most accurately encompasses "relationships between people", which is what even SEO is about when you think about it. It's everything that's not under the "paid advertising" umbrella. So, public relations is essentially every unorthodox form of marketing, where you're garnering publicity without outright paying the person who owns the first touch with the potential customer (typically, "the media", but increasingly Google).
Are we search engine relations? Nope, too techie. Are we customer relationship management (CRM)? Perhaps, but already taken by a category of software. I don't have the answer yet. Maybe the terms SEO or PR can still be pulled out of the fire. Or maybe the term is so obvious and right in front of all of our faces, that we just can't see it.
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