You'd think that after four years, the incredibly actionable HitTail keyword tool would start losing it's appeal, but as it turns out, the tough economic conditions are actually just opening Marketers' eyes to the wisdom of targeting the long tail. It's an easy and systematic method of bringing in well qualified prospective customers and audience to your website without spending a dime.
Well, technically it's $10/mo and your time writing.
But that's the perfect way to spend your money right now. Dig in and fortify by producing copious perfectly optimized content. It will likely produce some new customers today, but when economic conditions improve, you will have performed the content-build already, and be positioned for a real take-off!
Our competitors know this, and are bidding in AdWords on our keywords. Ha Ha Ha! It's nice to be acknowledged as the leader. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can't find pricing on their website. I bet THEY'RE not $10/mo.
So stick with the actionable keyword tool leader, who is also the best priced. We want to be your best friend during this recession.
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!
Leveraging the Twitter Parrot Effect for Online Marketing
Admittedly, I haven't blogged much here on the HitTail blog. I could slap excuses on it like, HitTail's running reliably as promised since it's launch in late 2006, showing real-time search hits and issuing writing suggestions, which when acted upon, pretty reliably seize you the first page of Google results. It's a nice little secret weapon in online marketing circles, and the fan-base is as strong as ever, despite our switch from freemium to try-and-buy last year.
The fact we sustained such a business-model switch is remarkable, and that we're going into this recession with a $10/mo product that helps you sell your wares online... well, it couldn't be the conditions for a more perfect storm.
I'm hoping for nothing less than to get the entire world of bloggers who are trying to build their traffic merely by virtue of writing (if you write it, they will come) onto HitTail. It's a modest goal, as all the other ways of doing this are too convoluted (analyzing your own log files with an algorithm like HitTail's) or expensive (using one of the few packages that's finally catching onto the long-tail thing). So HitTail fans, start spreading the word.
Speaking of blogging--of course, micro-blogging with Twitter or Facebook status and posted items (now links) is all the rage. When these pages (like Twitter tweet pages) are not protected with a login, they do influence search, but the landing pages are usually nofollowed--meaning that they don't confer the SEO benefit in turn to the sites you link to. None-the-less, services like Twitter are valuable online marketing tools because they do help drive traffic to your site, albeit not directly.
There is another interesting effect that inspired me to get this blog post out today: the Twitter "parrot effect".
In other words, I post, then a HitTail user posts about my post--because it's about them, and micro-blogging is so easy with tools like TwitterFox.
Amplification of my message ensues, and the cycle continues.
So even though I haven't been posting here much in the HitTail SEO marketing blog, I have been posting in Everyone Loves HitTail, where I collect the quotes, testimonials, and generally every mention of HitTail that my monitoring tools clue me into. And recently following a bout of post-vomiting, I noticed my monitoring tools reporting back to me every post I made... twice! Once in the standard blog monitoring tools driven by Technorati and Google Blog Search (as expected), but then again by people micro-blogging about my blog posts. I've posted the screen-shot below to show the Twitter activity on HitTail recently--none of those are me.
Yet, about half are repeating my words.
Nice.
Online marketers, take notice. If you're not maintaining a clip-book of positive quotes in a blog that somehow ties into social networking in a way that ensures your built-in audience is tuned-in, then you're not even doing the basics.
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.
If you're trying to understand how the best longtail tool for selecting keywords for new website content works, check out this flow chart. We used to promote this flowchart rather heavily on the HitTail site. Unfortunately, it's been played down. But I encourage you to check it out to see how you can begin effective longtail marketing today.
SEO firms often struggle with measuring and communicating the value of their services. Often times they give good qualitative reasons to go with their firm but ignore hard numbers that could help close the deal. As marketers become more accountable for ROI of initiatives such as SEO, it will be important for SEO firms to give accurate projections on how much value they can offer.
So what are the best ways to put a monetary value on natural search traffic? Is it enough to tell a prospective client that your firm can get them on the first page of Google for “xyz widgets”? They may be more concerned with how many new customers you can bring them or how many new leads they will get after doing SEO. Going forward, the discussion will be less about specific rankings and more about the actual ROI from natural search traffic converting into sales or leads.
SEOMoz has a great post on the opportunity gap which is the difference between the status quo and where they could be in terms of search traffic. It’s important to tell prospective clients how much money they’re leaving on the table by NOT doing SEO.
The first step is to figure out how your prospective client measures success – is it simply higher rankings on benchmark keywords, more conversions, more pageviews, or something else? The next step is to ask them specific questions about their current situation that will help you predict what you can do for them. For example, ask them what their current conversion rate is for their existing traffic. Also ask them what % of their overall traffic comes from natural search? If they are willing to tell you this during initial discussions, then you can give them a pretty good estimate on ROI.
The next post will walk through some very basic examples.
Danny Dover at SEOmoz recently posted a fascinating article on the state of blogs. There are great stats on who controls the top blogs as well as the gender breakdown and audience profile for high traffic blogs.
One of the key takeaways is that there is still a lot of room for growth, especially in non-Technology topics. In addition, there is a huge opportunity to develop new blogs targeted at women. The key here is to find a niche and develop a new audience in a unsaturated market.
Inspired bloggers out there can then use tools like HitTail to determine what are the hot topics people are interested in within a particular niche that will drive traffic to their blog.
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.
There is a need for niche keywords--longtail keywords. Call 'em what you will, but they super-charge both your AdWords campaigns and SEO efforts. Their very nature as obscure but effective make well chosen long tail keywords the best deal in marketing.
For those already into AdWords, think 4% CTR, $0.06 CPC and tons of clicks. For those still only doing SEO, think about reducing the need to continuously expand website content.
That's about to become commonplace, because one of the best kept secrets in natural SEO is about to cross the chasm into mainstream marketing, and AdWords will never be the same.
With just a wee bit of keyword review and approval on your part, your AdWords campaigns will virtually become self-optimizing. We take the competitive intelligence that your site is always trying to give you but which most analytics software ignores (as long-time HitTail fans know well), and feed it directly into your AdWords campaign.
The result is simply amazing, as long-time HitTailer and million-dollar campaign manager Gary Beal has been trying to tell the world for a year. But alas, we are only just starting to teach the world this amazing approach to AdWords campaign management.
The irony here is that its coming from the very same PR firm that helped launch GoTo--later Overture, and today Yahoo! Search Marketing-- the company that taught Google how to make money. Yes, the very same Connors Communications that helped get Amazon off the ground is about to teach everybody how to be low-budget brilliant marketers... by living on the edge of the keyword competition.
The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.
That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.
But how do you reach them in the first place?
What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.
Word of mouth only got you so far.
Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.
The time was ripe.
And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.
Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.
Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.
My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".
I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.
I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.
I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.
All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.
And we saw that the time was right.
Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.
HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.
HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.
But it's the first act.
And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.
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.
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?
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!
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.
"Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they're set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there's even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone."
In an interesting development, Yahoo will be including Facebook profile images in its search results.
Chris Boggs at Search Engline Watch presents "SEO confessions of an Online Reputation Management Junkie"
"I admit it -- I've been tracking search engine rankings for my name for years. But online reputation management isn't all about ego or checking out a Friday night date anymore. Your career and future job opportunities are at stake."
"Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian comedian, actor, and political satirist, writes one of the few non-English language blogs that's become wildly popular worldwide. That's because Grillo speaks the international language of outrage."
And the The New York Times reports on the shift in online advertising, looking past mere increased brand awareness to as many clicks as possible.
ReadWriteWeb asks: "Is the mobile web dead?" Good question! We think it just might be that reports of its impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Certainly, having a fully-functioning mobile web requires a consistent web viewing platform and resolution (at least getting it down to four with iPhone, Opera, IE Mobile, and Android). Right now there are just too many flavors out there. At least with computer monitors, you can be reasonably sure that everyone will have at least 800x600 if not 1024x768 and greater -- but with phones, there are so many formats!
Still, we think there is a lot of untapped potential with mobile.
Onto today's other posts of interest:
Blog Storm ponders Google's policy on using "widget bait" to rack up links
John Battelle notes that Google's share keeps climbing...their search share, that is.
Meanwhile, Search Engine Land explores the search benefits of the blogosphere with a handy illustration:
Web News Hits - April 14, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links
Search Engine Land points out that Google now fills out forms and crawls the results -- potentially opening up material on the so-called "invisible web."
Speaking from the experience of a company that has been bringing visibility to the deep web for years, webmasters should not rely on this service alone. Even if Google does start filling in forms, the results will not be optimized.
"It's a question marketers are still grappling with years after the first waves of corporate blogging flooded the web. But for better or worse, it seems corporate blogging -- and the title of chief blogger -- is beginning to hit its stride. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott and Kodak all have recently recruited chief bloggers, with or without the actual title, to tell their stories and engage consumers."
"2. Viruseful. Viral marketing initiatives that are actually useful. "Not only did Shave Everywhere make me laugh—I was able to configure and purchase my new electric razor online"
Web News Hits - April 11, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links
It's a small business blogging success story, told by Search Engine Land:
"Meet John W. Tuggle, a guitarist living in Athens, Georgia. John has been playing guitar for 17 years, and giving private lessons for 14 years. Like many music instructors, John put his knowledge into a "how to" book and built a web site to sell it. That was about two years ago. After 18 months of struggles (he thinks he sold five books), John was ready to give up teaching; he was going to play gigs and be a studio engineer."
And Tuggle uses HitTail to help him write his blog posts:
"Obviously blog posts can become tiresome, because it's not just a blog post. If all I had to do was write a guitar lesson or story that would be easy. But first I check HitTail and look at the suggestions and what I need help in ranking for. Then I determine what keywords I need to focus on and figure out what I can write about that will interest people, while at the same time help me to get searched or improve rankings. It's a double edged sword. You want to get some good rankings out of the post, but at the same time you have to write good content for people."
"The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs."
"Over the weekend I decided to get serious about my email situation. I’d been sitting on an inbox with close to 10,000 items in it for months and was feeling more and more stressed by the day.
"I posted on Twitter that I needed to do something about it and then decided to take action. Within 24 hours I had an inbox with no items in it (well momentarily) and have been able to maintain that ever since (OK, so it’s only three days, but it’s been a very busy three days)."
And Search Engine Land reports on a study that indicated that the overwhelming majority of searches are informational in nature:
"A Penn State research study showed that about 80-percent of searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional.
The researchers reviewed over 1.5 million queries from hundreds of thousands of search engines users to prove the "the 80/20 rule that 80 percent of the cases can be achieved with these clear-cut methods," said IST assistant professor Jim Jansen."
Search Engline Land reports on Flickr's new video feature -- and says it's not quite a YouTube clone
Michael Arrington says he has seen the future of social media -- and it's mobile:
"A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings."
Dosh Dosh suggests that we narrow our focus if we want our message to "stick":
"A persuasive blog post or sales letter argues one point and accentuates it thoroughly with analogies, metaphors, examples and references. Just one point, because too many and you’ll not only lose your own focus but the attention of your audience. You don’t want to distract them from taking action."
“I was reading an article about sharks and it got me thinking about PPC management. Sure, most people’s brains may not make that leap, but that’s the way I roll. Sharks have been around for approximately 450 million years. Their survival is not by accident; it is a result of evolutionary instinct combined with aggressive predatory skills.”
Finally, Copyblogger gives advice on how to price your freelance writing work:
“If you go looking for advice on how to price freelance writing work, you’ll find that one thing gets repeated nearly everywhere: don’t lowball yourself. There’s a natural tendency in business to feel like you need every client you can find, and that can often mean settling for a below-market rate in exchange for simply having the work. The standard advice is, “don’t fall into that trap.”
Web News Hits - April 7, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links
Facebook will be launching their new chat service, ReadWriteWeb reports The New York Times reports on Yahoo’s new ad system:
“Yahoo said the system, called AMP and still months away from being ready, would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo’s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads on their own sites as well as on Yahoo and on the sites of other publishers in the company’s growing network.”
SearchEngineLand reports on a study that finds blended search resulting in more clicks for news, images, and video:
“Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, "news" results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. The study's overall findings reinforce a point increasingly being made: marketers need to broaden and optimize their various content types to be found in blended search results.”
Web News Hits - April 3 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links
Breaking News The New York Times reports that 300 are set to go at Doubleclick…
…and Matt Cutts talks about Google spinning off the search marketing side of Performics:
Personally, we think it was the right move for Google & applaud their actions.
SearchEngineLand suggests how to make your content “submit worthy”:
“In order to be successful on social media news and bookmarking sites, you have to think like a typical power user. Start by understanding some fundamental truths about the users of these sites.”
Small Business SEM helpfully explains how to add a business to MSN/Live Local Search
Ad Age advises that to reach shoppers, retailers need to think beyond the print circular…and go digital
“The U.S. trails emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Russia in the adoption of activities including blogging, social networking and video-sharing. China, for instance, has already surpassed the U.S. in the number of people starting their own blogs, at 43 million compared to 26.4 million.”
“Each year since about 2000 -- and maybe even before -- has been wrongly touted as the year of mobile marketing. And this year won't be it either, despite the we're-not-kidding-this-time rhetoric being spouted by mobile-marketing boosters converging for telecom's big powwow in Las Vegas this week. Here are five reasons why -- and five fixes that could make 2009 the year the channel becomes really, truly, we're-not-joking meaningful.”
ReadWriteWeb has an overview of four services that allow users to conduct polls on Twitter.
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.
We've been seeing a lot of traffic coming from Steve Rubel's blog post on Friday. I'm flattered that Steve mentioned a recent entry on how blogs can quickly see benefits from SEO. We all know that blogs are often used to position companies as industry leaders and spokespeople as authoritative. That's something our parent company, Connors Communications, knows something about considering its 20+ year history in public relations. And yet obviously times are changing -- which is why we developed HitTail.
Google says that one of the best ways to drive traffic (and therefore get your message out) is by having something worthwhile to say. HitTail helps bloggers gain respect by providing suggested writing topics that interest their audience and are beneficial to readers as well as search engines.
What is the point of blogging if no one finds your blog? You might as well keep a private journal. Blogs may gain some readers from word of mouth and viral marketing, but you can bet that the most successful ones have been learning something from the keywords that people use to find them.
I'm sure that Steve and others in PR are beginning to recognize that the importance of ranking well in search results is just as valuable, or even moreso, than appearing in news articles due to the fragmentation of media.
When even the New York Times writes their headlines with Search in mind, you have to compete with SEO if you want to be heard on similar topics. Or you can hunt for treasure in the long tail with HitTail.
I don't think enough has been written about the benefits of keyword research beyond simply one's search optimization plan.
For instance, what about using one's keyword research as a window into the buying preferences of your targeted consumers? Might not such numbers determine not just what keywords to target in the future, but the entire approach to your product as well?
I’ll use the long tail results provided and highlighted by the HitTail service as an example. Say you are in the business of making chocolates. A relatively good portion of the long tail results you have received through HitTail involve variations of the phrase, “chocolate covered strawberries.”
Well heck – maybe moving your business into specifically manufacturing chocolate-covered strawberries would be a good idea! These long tail results are giving you more than tips on good SEO – they are giving you market research.
Take another example that this interesting article on the subject from Media Post proposed – movies. Say you gather from analyzing search query volume that one movie has significantly more “buzz” than another. This might be helpful to project not only what film might do better at the box office, but where one’s marketing budget might be better spent. Or you get a bunch of long tail results like “Movie X Horrible” and “Movie X Bomb.” Maybe the long tail is trying to tell you something important about “Movie X.”
I think there are so many applications to SEO research and services like HitTail that we just don’t know about – yet. It might be advantageous to explore these options on our own and take advantage of them before the general marketing community does.
Quick results in Search Marketing are only possible with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, right? Wrong. The advent of blogging, as well as recent advances to search engine algorithms, has narrowed the gap between PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to mere hours. With PPC, there is instant gratification as your advertisement will appear in search results almost immediately after your campaign is activated. However, this same advantage can now be seen in SEO.
First, let's take a look at some common reasons why SEO projects have not been carried out in the past.
Companies don’t want to abandon tech investments (e.g. content management systems and web publishing tools)
Lack of budget dedicated to SEO
May take a while to demonstrate ROI
Blogging addresses each of these problems.
SEO best practices are already in place
Blogging software by default includes a few basic but important SEO practices by using proper Titles, headlines, URLs, and internal linking structure. Search engines also like sites that have fresh content, which can give blogs great influence over search results.
Recent search engine algorithm changes boost the visibility of blogs
This recent experiment by Ryan Durk took advantage of temporary changes in Google’s logo linking to the search results page for "January 1 TCP/IP". It shows two things: the speed by which a new blog is indexed and the short time between your blog getting indexed and it appearing high in search results.
Blogs are inexpensive and easy to setup
A new blog can be created in a matter of minutes with little technical knowledge. Blog creation is free in many cases, often with a nominal monthly fee for additional features.
Blogging is great for companies that are not ready to make the larger SEO investment or are worried about abandoning a CMS in which they have already invested. Blogging can be used as a proof of concept that shows that SEO can deliver results. Use of blogging software delays the larger discussion of SEO projects that are potentially more time-consuming and require a larger investment that reap longer term benefits. Setting up a blog is inexpensive and doesn’t force you to abandon or modify your existing IT investments.
Then get people to notice your blog.
Conduct Keyword Research
Creating a blog is just the first step. Keyword research can be the difference between a highly popular, authoritative blog and a blog that no one knows exists.
Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less competitive topics so your site has the ability to rank for those terms. HitTail can facilitate this process of identifying writing topics that other sites aren’t necessarily targeting, yet will drive traffic.
If you’re just getting started with blogging, write about a subject where you have expertise that you feel will interest your audience. Once you reach a critical mass of blog posts, take a step back and analyze how people are finding your blog and use that information to guide your editorial calendar.
Utilize Social Media and Pinging
In addition to keyword research, it is important to promote the blog using social media tools that increase the visibility of your blog and generate inbound links to your domain. Be sure to utilize pinging services to notify aggregation services of new content on your blog.
Customize the blog template
It is also important to link to your new blog from the Homepage of your main website to make it easier for search engine spiders to discover it. Often times, the default template needs to be tweaked slightly for maximum SEO benefit. For instance, make sure your blog Permalink uses meaningful anchor text and not "www.yourdomain.com/blog/?p=456"
Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your website.
Say for example you want to get away from the clutches of PPC advertising, the first thing you should know is how people are finding your website online. Hittail does this, records the frequency, the keywords, the time of the search, the country and much more. In addition in the click of a button, you can have it suggest new terms for your to optimize for your business based on the results gathered from the live statistics.
For over a year now, HitTail has been talking to its audience about one aspect of the future of marketing--the long tail, where smaller more agile companies can live in "niches" left behind by larger competitors. It works perfectly online, because inexpensive "word of mouth" marketing is intensified through the ability to forward links in email and the use of social networks. But marketing hasn't completely changed. There still are plenty of companies with large budgets, able to shape popular perceptions through saturation TV, print and radio campaigns. These days, those companies are simply adding online banner ads and keyword campaigns to the mix. But it's all still basically just advertising.
Now, the practice of taking advantage of how Google arbitrates traffic to use it to your natural advantage has evolved into the field of search engine optimization. But it's a field that continually shifts, just as the search results do. It only comprises a fraction of what we call marketing. Pay-per-click (a.k.a. Google AdWords) makes this process a bit clearer and more accessible to the mainstream, but even with that added in, it only accounts for maybe $10 billion of what is maybe a $500 billion industry. To really divine the future of marketing, you have to look at how a "long-tail" or niche advertising campaign picks up momentum, and how the company intelligently leverages its revenue to go back into more creative marketing, and how the snowball effect can kick in.
HitTail prescribes a particular formula that helps small to medium sized companies master that process of generating consistent, reliable small successes. When enough of these small successes compound on each other, they fund more aggressive and expensive campaigns. It's very possible, for example, to have completely free natural search produce your first dozen customers, who can fund you to start your first pay-per-click campaign.
Now, if this all sounds very entrepreneurial to you, well then, you got the point. The future of marketing is not about the large, established and complacent organizations. It's about the little guy with enough creativity, determination and patience to get that snowball rolling... rolling... rolling... straight at that stationary competitor.
We recently came across a great example of 1) how quickly a new blog post can appear in search results and 2) the value of HitTail's real-time reporting.
Kenton Newby describes his experience with amazing indexing results after publishing a blog post and finding it in search results within 2 hours of posting it and at the top of the 2nd page of results for the query "define Google Analytics bounce rate"
We've discussed these types of cases in the past here. One of the big advantages of PPC is that you see results immediately after you activate an ad campaign. With SEO, it usually takes longer to see the results of your work. However, blogging has shown that this gap is narrowing and that it's possible to see the results of your SEO efforts in natural search results within hours or days of publishing.
Note that HitTail's real-time report alerted Kenton to the fact that his blog post was getting traffic as it occurred. This realization would not have been possible using other analytics tools where there is a delay in viewing referrer data.
How do you take action on this data?
The real-time data is especially useful for bloggers who pay attention to social media and get a lot of their traffic from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For example, if you are logged in to your HitTail account and you notice a bunch of new referrers on the Search Hits tab from StumbleUpon or Digg, you can take action immediately by bookmarking the site yourself or notifying your network to increase visibility for that blog post. This practice has the potential to create a quick short-term boost in traffic.
The value of long tail keywords is sometimes overlooked by marketers that are just getting started with SEO. It is natural to want to go after highly sought after terms, but it is often unrealistic for new sites to rank well for those keywords. With more companies getting into SEO & SEM, the value of less popular keywords will be on the rise.
If you're a small business or eCommerce site with a limited budget, the most profitable strategy is to go after keywords in the "long tail" which convert at a much higher rate than the generic two word combinations that may bring a lot of visitors to your site, but very few customers. Go after these competitive terms after you have demonstrated success ranking for the long tail keywords.
Not all traffic is equal
What's better, making 2 or 3 sales from 1,000 visitors who found your website searching on the term "car insurance", or 20 sales from 40 visitors who searched for "car insurance quote Brooklyn, New York"? The answer depends on if you are monetizing your site with advertising or if you are an eCommerce site looking for more sales online.
Visitors that come to your site, leave, and never come back are not as valuable as a few qualified visitors that make (repeat) purchases on your site
Don't be fooled by estimates that show these long tail phrases with very low search volumes. When it comes to making money online, you need to know which types of phrases will lead to conversions and sales, not just traffic to your site.
Long tail keyword searches are conducted by people who are often ready to make a purchase
Jennifer Laycock, Editor of Search Engine Guide, has written extensively about the Search Buying Cycle.
Here are some examples of phrases that show the difference between research and intent to purchase:
Research:"High definition TVs" Intent to purchase:"Sony Bravia 52 inch HDTV price"
Research:"luxury apartments" Intent to purchase:"Chicago 1 bedroom luxury apartment"
Using HitTail along with blogging software is a great way to get started going after the long tail. HitTail doesn't show you generic terms that everyone in your industry will compete for. It's suggesting terms that you know your site has the ability to rank for if you deliberately target them. It saves you time that would have been spent on keyword research and allows you to focus that time on writing.
Don't have the time to write about long tail topics? Try using a ghost article writing service like Content Spooling Network.
If you think it's inefficient to go after these terms one by one, then consider an automated approach to take advantage of the long tail based on your existing content/database assets. This system will create highly targeted search-friendly pages that can be justified from an editorial standpoint. Contact Connors for more information about our enterprise SEO and strategic writing services.
HitTail is doing very well as a site on search terms related to the long tail and search hits. For the term “long tail” we’re on the second page of results, and for the term “search hits” we’re on the first page. For any combination, such as “long tail hits” or “long tail search” we are on the first page of results.
So, one of the primary effects of HitTail is taking place: the combined variations of different targeted keywords are already coming up high, without even trying. But this blog post is really about zeroing in on your most difficult, and most competitive keywords. In the case of HitTail, one of them is shaping up to be “keyword research”.
I’ve made 2 blog posts in the past that have targeted this term. But they haven’t produced for us yet. It’s a perfect example of how HitTail doesn’t work every time—it just works on average. This keyword combination actually has enough traffic to show on Google Trends, which is an amazing thing, considering what a marketing niche specialty keyword research is. But it also tells me that I’m on the right track with attacking a term that already has a lot of pre-existing traffic.
Unless you have a massive marketing budget, or your own TV network, it’s difficult to change the pattern of searching on the Internet. There were two watershed events that really showed us how search trends can change suddenly: The World Trade Center / 911, and the Janet Jackson Super Bowl event. But 99% of the time, search trends are all over the map, and search marketers are in the business of putting yourself into the path of searchers and search traffic that is already occurring, no matter what you do.
So, how to put HitTail into the path of people researching “keyword research”?
Well, the page can’t just be another text-only, low-effort, long-tail HitTail page. It has to be built up into something a little more special. This is increasingly turning out to be a picture, or maybe some YouTube video.
So, what I'm doing is making an early morning post, just to get this post out there and percolating. But during the day, I'll be beefing it up with:
Some YouTube video.
A bell-curve illustration that we use to diagram the benchmark vs. longtail keyword issue.
And this post will start generating traffic in the meanwhile, and it's existence urgently commits me to following through with the snazzing up the the page that needs to occur to make it effective on my targeted term.
And of course, for anyone who did find this page on the concept of keyword research, you've come to the right place. HitTail is one of the best keyword research tools available, because it helps you leverage the traffic that's already occurring on your site, to get more traffic. Success breeds success. Third party keyword research tools that cull aggregate data from search engines and other people's sites are somewhat overrated, considering there are much more effective approaches available that hardly anyone even knows about yet.
The Future of Marketing, Ushered in by Connors Communications
For years, Connors Communications has been recognized as leaders in the field of public relations. Whenever a client required the public to make a major shift in conventional thinking, Connors was there.
Before the Worldwide Web, when online was first coming onto the scene, and companies like Prodigy had to get the word out (and ironically, had to actually BE a prodigy), Connors was there, helping them become a player beside CompuServe and AOL.
When established brands like Disney and National Geographic had to make their transition to the dot-com world, Connors was there, helping with brand identity issues, like NG's yellow square, and carrying some of the first search engine optimization work ever performed for large businesses.
When the first attempts to seriously monetize search were being made by pioneers, GoTo.com (long before becoming part of Yahoo!), Connors was there, helping to break the church-and-state issues of pay-per-click.
When everyone either never heard of VOIP, or thought it was going to be exclusively a business service, Connors was there, helping Vonage turn it into a consumer brand and a household concept.
When Amazon.com was competing to become one of the first successful online businesses, before anyone thought selling over the Internet was even viable on a large scale, Connors was there-helping to pioneer long tail business before anyone even heard of the concept.
When Priceline.com decided to go with the name-your-own-price model, re-introducing haggling into the American psyche, Connors was there.
In all these things, Connors helped break traditional thinking, introducing unorthodox concepts, which were later to become the norm, and part of the mainstream American thinking. This is our unique capability. This is our specialty.
Today we are using these skills in ways people are still having difficulty understanding. Our decision to create HitTail is part of packaging our new brand of marketing for the world, and to provide an introduction of Connors Communications to the world-a sort of "overture", if you will.
So while today, we no longer consider ourselves a "public relations company" as such, I'm always arguing that it's just a matter of semantics. Whereas breaking our story into mainstream media got tons of leverage in the past, today, it's a matter of breaking our story into Google and Yahoo! search results in such an effective fashion, that your website keeps corralling your target audience back into your Web presence over and over, to the point that over time, there is no escape but to become familiar with you.
This is a type of branding that's going on today, which most people don't even recognize as branding. It's how new websites and companies "emerge" onto the mainstream without a speck of advertising. It's using all the principles of public relations that have proven so effective over the ages, and to bring them to bear in a much more efficient and automated fashion. It's giving large companies back the advantage that is so easily being taken away from them by smaller, nimbler companies who have embraced the new landscape.
Yet still, it is about achieving balance, so small large companies cannot respond with such force as to shut the small companies out again. This is why Connors is offering services on the extreme high-end, circa $25K/mo., and on the extreme low-end, circa $100/year. And perhaps more than anyone else, this extreme "bracketing" of products between the two extremes, defines what Connors is becoming-the ability to innovate Web 2.0 products on-demand for our own use, and the savvy to navigate the politics of large media companies to have search engine optimization projects successfully carried out, against all odds.
One of the first sites to catch onto how important our SEO flowchart is, is Indonesian. I'm certainly glad I'm reaching Indonesia, but I am somewhat disappointed that no English-speaking websites have picked up on this yet. I think this chart will trigger off the HitTail marketing revolution because of how it brings down lofty longtail concepts to a route procedure,
I've been linking to the most-critical diagram from just about every page of the HitTail site, trying to get folks to understand the essence of what HitTailing is. I apparently haven't been doing such a great job, and would be appreciative of any ideas on how me might get the message out more. We're getting an affiliate program together that will be based around high-volume sites, so anyone willing to partake, please contact me. Anyone with low-volume sites who would like to eventually participate, just follow out the procedure on the diagram, and contact us when you've built up your traffic!
I have to bring this HitTail review to your attention. It strikes many chords with me.
First, it documents the experience of installing and getting started with HitTail, and the discoveries of where your traffic is really coming from (keyword-wise). Most people just don't get that most traffic comes from the collection of small, incidental word-combo's, which you never targeted, but somehow are still being found on. Added together, it almost always out-performs your top keywords, so keeping the content-engine churning is well worth it.
Second, it's from "A Tale of 2 WAHMs", which is totally encouraging to me. For those not familiar with that acronym, it stands for "work at home moms". I share with Connors Communications (my employer), the general feeling that we're changing the world with HitTail. And while what we're doing isn't exactly like manufacturing 90% efficient solar cells (which will change the world), as an evolving public relations firm (more on that soon), we CAN make a positive impact on peoples' lives. Specifically in this case, we can help to enable a workforce whose composition is exactly analogous to the long tail effect that makes HitTail work.
Think about it.
You've got work at home mom's around the world, carving out businesses for themselves based on eBay, Google Checkout, or a host of other eCommerce systems. Individually, they are each a small business. But collectively, I speculate that it's a work force as large as the largest companies.
Now, I'm not advocating that they band together and start a single company. But I am advocating bolstering marketing capabilities within a portion of the economy where budget's don't exist for TV and newspaper advertisements, and barely even for targeted marketing like AdWords. Unfortunately, they don't have anything like co-op marketing budgets. But fortunately, all you really need these days is something worthwhile to say related to your product or service.
And we provide a megaphone.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
In this video blog post, I answer one of the most asked questions about HitTail: How can we find writing topics to suggest for you based on the traffic from your own site, if you haven't written about the topic yet? Part of the magic comes from the unique way blogging software works. It lets you find perfect writing topics related to things you've already written about, but offers up the magic word combinations actual searchers are using. Curious? Watch the video.
HitTail is all about generating traffic online, of the best sort: qualified visitors. We've been extolling HitTail's ability to do this for over a year. But from time to time, it's nice for us to demonstrate how it works. This video was produced as a demonstration of the use of the HitTail product itself, and results it has produced after several months.
I'm about to create an SEO FAQ and plant it on the HitTail site. It's going to be different from many of the FAQ's out there, because our philosophy is different, as many know who have watched us evolve. We agree with marketing guru's like Seth Godin who say that SEO is becoming less important--but only because the technical factors are gradually going away. Those who write best and have the most valuable content, will be rewarded.
But that's not the whole story. Behind that is also the emergence of ready-optimized-for-search blogging software, the arrival of a programming practice called "separation of concerns" to Web development, and new ways of thinking about Web publishing forced by new delivery platforms such as the iPhone.
I've got a lot of birds to kill with one stone with this document. Eventually, I'll give it a new home in the HitTail site proper. But until then, you'll see the "first steps" of as this blog post.
I'm going to title this post the SEO FAQ, because HitTail suggested that I write about it. I might as well start building the traffic now in preparation for re-inventing the entire profession. Apparently, HitTail was found 9 pages in on the topic, and 7 pages in at the time I checked. This is a good sign, because the face of SEO is currently changing, and we are at the forefront of those changes. Without even trying, we're on the radar. Armed with that information, I have an ideal starting point for driving it to the first page.
This will also be an interesting challenge, because there's a bunch of heavy-hitter SEO sites at the top of the list. There's one with a custom domain for the purpose, seofaq.net. Then, there's Jill Whalen, with whom I've had an interesting time trying to explain HitTail and the long tail concept. You've got the big StepForth marketing company and the Google Webmaster Central website. There's About.com and SEOmoz among others. Penetrating the first page will be a fun little experiment.
I'll start out just with this blog post, but it's going to grow into an actual document to go with the new Connors ABCs demo. After folks view that demo, they ask for follow-up material. Really, we can't put much more about the system, or we're giving away too much. We can't say much less, because it's already in demo format, and you can't get lighter information than that. So basically, I'll just be putting the demo into written format, and put it into context with the rest of the SEO industry. So, it will probably fit the format of an SEO FAQ very nicely.
I will have to be careful to not write an entire book. I could start out with some broad questions, and end up with an entire book on search engine optimization. So, I'll start just by getting out the questions.
Why is natural search important?
What sort of companies should pay attention to natural search?
Why is the natural search problem so hard for large companies to fix?
How is natural search different from Google AdWords campaigns?
Is Google the only important search engine?
How long does a natural search campaign take to work?
How do I reconcile all the conflicting information I hear about natural search?
Isn't it true that natural search can never really be formalized as a profession with guaranteed results, because of the way search engines work?
What made Connors Communications tackle natural search so differently from everyone else?
So not all new writing topics come directly from HitTail suggestions. Sometimes, it's much more indirect, but still HitTail-related. For example, because you see ALL referral links in real-time, you can see that a discussion has been created about you in a forum MOMENTS after it's been created. You don't rely on Technorati, Google search or anything else--except for the fact that someone followed a link to your site, and HitTail noticed.
Using this technique, I discovered the MommysHelperCommunity.com. Now imagine for a moment what it would take to discover this link otherwise. It MAY have shown up in analytics software if you looked precisely the right location. You MAY have it brought to your attention within some amount of days of the post occurring.
But with HitTail, I knew INSTANTANEOUSLY! I followed the link back, and I saw the discussion just as it was being born. Basically, the moment the author tests the link--you know!
You might wonder why I didn't step in and start posting there immediately.
Well, this is a great example of how I like unbiased discussion to start first. I'm truly curious to see what people have to say before I go predisposing them. Of course, after a little while I step in, which shows them both that I care about their site (always a big boost to them), and that I'm there to answer questions.
In this way, the entire online world becomes my forum. I don't care where I answer. In one case, I'm in a discussion with a bunch of lovely ladies known as PSO's (phone sex operators). I'm tied in with the work-a-home-moms WAHMs community now through several different links. The level of trust is so unbelievably high, that when the forums are private, I'm regularly granted complementary guest logins so I can go and answer questions.
THIS is precisely where most other PR firms who are doing the online thing trip up. They never know a product with such intimacy that they can represent it as a living online embodiment of the company and the product. In my case, as the creator of HitTail, and an online social butterfly, I find it second nature. And this is the attitude I imbue into my team of online outreach folks here at Connors Communications.
While we can't churn out clones of the product-creators to do with other companies what Connors does with HitTail, what we CAN do is the closes thing possible.
We use HitTail to really get into the mind of the Client's potential audience. We get to know the company's founder or product-creator, so we can think like them, and eventually speak in their voice. We get to learn the ins-and-outs of the product, and get under the company's hood. Why do they like it? Why do they hate it?
And by engaging in such practices and surfing back through the referrers (and this is how the article comes full-circle), we know the unknowable. That is, we know what would be unknowable to ANY OTHER PR firm in NYC. This is something we've done regularly for clients for years.
And now that we've extracted HitTail from our high-end SEO offerings, it's time I started teaching the HitTailing audience OTHER ways to use the real-time flow of data that HitTail provides.
This is one.
Don't ALWAYS follow suggestions. Sometimes write for a specific new audience that you just discovered, like the WAHMs (work at home mom's).
Know EVERY discussion that's taking place about you, your products or your company--even when it never showed up in Blog Search or Google Alerts.
So, drinking our own cool-aid turns out to be quite tasty.
I blogged the other day about taking the HitTail writing suggestion of "NY SEO". Sounds reasonable. We provide SEO services in New York City, and never put those words specifically together, but someone found us on it regardless. Finding us on that term, buried tons of pages in (yes, those SEO's are competitive), they tipped their hand to us that we COULD be found on that term, so I put it in our "To Do" list--sort of like an editorial calendar for competitive webmasters and bloggers.
Look where we are now:
Within 2 days, we were on the fourth page of Google results--nice but not spectacular. Today, we're on the first page (5 days). This is sometimes known as the "Google Honeymoon", and many SEO clients are disappointed within a few weeks of getting such spectacular results so quickly. And yes, dealing with the Google Honeymoon is a serious HitTailing issue. Don't misrepresent your capabilities to your client. It could backfire.
Instead, keep yourself from getting over-exuberant, but know that you can produce reliable short-term organic search success. Go ahead and impress your clients or boss with these short-term results, but qualify it. Tell them about the Google Honeymoon, but also tell them that these results can "set in" and become a permanent qualified traffic-generator with the right love and nurturing--ANOTHER reason HitTail isn't obsoleting traditional SEO, though on the surface, it sometimes looks that way. You still need to know how to make your body of HitTailing content take root. But merely keeping the content creation up over time, and always have a "Honeymoon" going on somewhere in your site keeps Google constant stimulated. Perhaps all results benefit? Hmmmmmm.
So at any rate, HitTail is a spankin' awesome way to hit the ground running with SEO and demonstrate to your clients the wonders to come if they stick with you for the long haul.
In taking our own advice a year after we've built up our critical mass of content (we're at about 450 optimized pages just over a year after website launch). We have a superior product and a message that we're proud of, making HitTail itself perhaps the best method of marketing HitTail. People are noticing this, picking up our message, and repeating it throughout the Internet.
We can now demonstrate the efficacy of our own product (drink our own cool-aid), using our own product in posts like this. If we keep that up, we're going to fill a very large space in the online marketing circles within one more year. I mean think about it, us getting top position on everything we write about with reliability that only HitTail can provide.
Was the example an anomaly?
Well, I went on a HitTailing binge there for a few posts. How reliable was it?
On another term I did August 15, Blog Marketing, HitTailing didn't seem to do a blessed thing. I went over 30 pages into the results, looking for my page to no avail. Makes me wonder how the suggestion got issued in the first place. But with 320 million competing pages and Seth Godin's own blog being 7 pages in, I think I ran up against the big head of the long tail of search. There are a lot of Marketers using blogs to... well, market. And their favorite topics of discussion? Marketing and blogging! So it stands to reason, I bit off more than I could chew by taking this suggestion. Perhaps we'll sharpen our filters to eliminate writing suggestions that "can't be easily conquered". We had the same issue on terms like Britney Spears.
But how about other terms?
Well, we did "Public Relations VS. Advertising" for which we're on the first page of results (without quotes, of course!).
I also did another 4-word term, "top pr firm in nyc", which one would think would be too long-tail to be worth it. Well, not only do we now get a regular flow of traffic on this (for which we should), but we're in THE #1 POSITION in Google in under a week.
Rinse and repeat.
Think how effective HitTailing can be when sustained over time. Yep, we've truly got an alternative to AdWords when you're discussing ways to acquire more qualified customers and audience to your website.
OK, how about the very latest? "Boutique PR Firm", which I just did on Saturday wasn't picked up yet. So, there are limits. We encountered TWO just in writing this post:
1. Some terms are still just too competitive, EVEN IF HitTail recommends that you write about them. While we COULD filter out these suggestions based on the difficulty you might encounter in pursuing them, they are by far the minority (we find), and leave them, because although you may not grab a top-spot instantly, it will still fortify your overall site, and stimulate subsequent serendipitous hits, albeit by the most determined searchers.
2. HitTail takes time. While you sometimes see HitTailing work its magic in only 2 days, don't bank on it. And even if your results DO get a top spot quickly, expect significant movement in that position over the following days or weeks. And HitTailing may not be enough to fortify those top positions. Think about making your content so link-worthy that you get those external links genuinely, without link-trading solicitation during the Google Honeymoon.
So in choosing the topic for today? I just took another HitTail suggestion of course. But I wrote the entire article first! Then, I went back to look for the best headline suggestion that matches the article. And even them, I did a quick bit of research to make sure the traffic was worth it, and that it didn't look unachievable.
Happy HitTailing! I'll try to put more concrete posts like this out there to counteract the marketing push I've been doing lately.
Yes, HitTail is a form of blog marketing. Once you've invested the time to build a blog, you want your intended audience to arrive at your site. But how does that happen, precisely? There's a lot of stock put in "building your subscribers" through your RSS feed. But I have a different message. A blog's exposure and effectiveness is mostly a function of people's ability to spontaneously rediscover it whenever they go to Google or some other search engine to research the topics your blog touches on.
That's right. Blogs are in great part, a search engine optimization play.
We can't say that enough. Blogs are content management systems that pander to precisely what search engines like to see in a page. They make the correct type of search-friendly web addresses. They construct the proper page-to-page internal link structures, which would be otherwise tedious to hand-code. They put exactly the right words in the title tag and headline. Blogs line up the "crosshairs" precisely right to drive traffic on the subject-matter of the blog post.
So, choosing the headline correctly for that page's topic is enormously important. In fact, we say that once you choose the proper headline, the rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing well. That's not to say the headline shouldn't be well written. It's just that the majority of traffic you're going to get for this page is determined at the moment you create the headline. So, it should receive special consideration.
So, to market your blog, specifically what you do is take a HitTail suggestion from under the Suggestion tab. Once you've decided to blog about that topic, as I'm doing here with the topic "blog marketing", work it into a sensible headline. In this case, the precise suggestion IS the headline. There's really no purpose for anything other than those two words in this headline.
Yet by saying so little, I'm saying so much. Perhaps this post will be one of those pieces of smoking-gun evidence of how well HitTail works. I guess we should give it a few days, then search on blog marketing. By discussing the topic in blogging software, I'm actually performing the act.
And sustained over time with topic after topic, my natural search traffic grows.
It's all very circular, see?
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Yes, HitTail is a form of blog marketing. Once you've invested the time to build a blog, you want your intended audience to arrive at your site. But how does that happen, precisely? There's a lot of stock put in "building your subscribers" through your RSS feed. But I have a different message. A blog's exposure and effectiveness is mostly a function of people's ability to spontaneously rediscover it whenever they go to Google or some other search engine to research the topics your blog touches on.
That's right. Blogs are in great part, a search engine optimization play.
We can't say that enough. Blogs are content management systems that pander to precisely what search engines like to see in a page. They make the correct type of search-friendly web addresses. They construct the proper page-to-page internal link structures, which would be otherwise tedious to hand-code. They put exactly the right words in the title tag and headline. Blogs line up the "crosshairs" precisely right to drive traffic on the subject-matter of the blog post.
So, choosing the headline correctly for that page's topic is enormously important. In fact, we say that once you choose the proper headline, the rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing well. That's not to say the headline shouldn't be well written. It's just that the majority of traffic you're going to get for this page is determined at the moment you create the headline. So, it should receive special consideration.
So, to market your blog, specifically what you do is take a HitTail suggestion from under the Suggestion tab. Once you've decided to blog about that topic, as I'm doing here with the topic "blog marketing", work it into a sensible headline. In this case, the precise suggestion IS the headline. There's really no purpose for anything other than those two words in this headline.
Yet by saying so little, I'm saying so much. Perhaps this post will be one of those pieces of smoking-gun evidence of how well HitTail works. I guess we should give it a few days, then search on blog marketing. By discussing the topic in blogging software, I'm actually performing the act.
And sustained over time with topic after topic, my natural search traffic grows.
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.
Here's an article that echoes many of HitTail's sentiments about how to write well AND bring in he most qualified visitors through search. Anyone who is not totally familiar with the subtly different brand of SEO that HitTail advocates should check out this article on the lost art of writing well.
A Meetup Invitation, a Connors Client Slot, and a Link-Back
Anyone who is in the New York area tonight is welcome to stop by they Prey bar for the SEO Superpowers Meetup, and say hello to the HitTail and Connors Communications crew.
A few other items I want to get out there in this post: Connors Communications, the company that created HitTail, and played a fundamental role in kick-starting the commercial Internet, has a few slots opening up in its SEO and PR schedule. Usually, engagements start at no less than $25K/mo. I thought I'd mention it on the HitTail blog, since this is where much of our audience currently resides. So if you know of someone with a large AdWords budget, looking to diversify and free themselves from the Google Tax Man, then drop us a line or corner me at Prey.
Also, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, almost any reference you make to HitTail in your blog post will usually score you a mention and a link-back in our TypePad collection of quotes and testmonials. So, if you've been waiting to say a few nice words about us, now seems like a good time.
And finally, I'm really pushing to get people to sign up for at least the Plus service, just as a way of supporting us. It's only $99.95 per year, and think how much time we're saving you struggling with those other analytics packages that ask you to jump through hoops before you figure out what to do with your data. As our quote page shows, we're rapidly becoming an integral part of many peoples' day-to-day marketing activities, and the surest way to a long-term relationship is throwing a little support our way!
Well, we just fixed the biggest criticism of HitTail. Those of you who follow this blog can check it out by simply visiting your "My Account" page.
No, we haven't made any change to our unique filtering system that often confuses people. We stick by it.
Nor is our biggest criticism the controversy we've triggered off in the SEO community. They'll eventually understand long tail data mining.
And no, the biggest criticism isn't even the original point made by John Battelle about how taking HitTail writing suggestions in pursuit of better natural search listings may be somewhat... inorganic.
No, the biggest criticism leveled against HitTail is how people want multiple websites per login.
You all want more HitTail! You want it to be easier to sign up the first account, then add site after site after site. Well, we heard you. And now you have "My Sites" on your "My Account" page. All free HitTail users can rapidly add up to 4 more sites (5 total) to each account. So now for all you HitTailers managing multiple accounts, it's a breeze.
What about the 6th site, you ask?
You always can create a new account, and do 5 more free sites. Free use of HitTail is still effectively unlimited.
But, if you're such an avid HitTailer and fan of our service, why not upgrade one of your sites to the Plus service, and support us? Not only do we greatly appreciate it, but then there's no limit to the number of sites you can add under a single account.
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.
Greetings HitTailers! I'll be presenting at the Web2NewYork New York Web Entrepreneurs MeetUp tonight. I'll be one of 6 presenters. I'll spare everyone the PowerPoint, and just dive into the 30-second elevator pitch that I refined at SES, NY. That should take 5 minutes. Then, I'll open it up to questions, answers, ridicule and heckling. Give me your best shot, New York! If I can make it here... well, you know the rest.
Anyone who follows HitTail's progress over Alexa knows that we've had considerable uptake over year 1, plateauing at about Alexa Rank #5000 top sites in the world, and have been creeping up ever so gradually.
Meanwhile, some of our pseudo-competitors who stuck themselves in the analytics box got some early notoriety, spiked, then started to tank. We attribute our sustained success to our real-time data combined with our immediately actionable explicit instructions of what to do with the data.
About half the people I talk with "get it" quickly, and about the other half just refuse to hear the message. I think those who don't get it actually do on some level, but reject that there are services that sit half-way between doing the work for you, and asking you to do the work. They either want to buy their keywords and get it all (Pay-Per-Click such as AdWords), or they have a very 1999 view of search engine optimization, where you have to worry about all the mechanics, such as title tags, URLs, link structure and the like.
I was at the Web 2.0 NY Summit on Thursday, and spoke to many of the media elite about HitTail. One unnamed fellow came up after Connie spoke to ask me about HitTail's chicken-and-egg problem. If the search hits aren't leading to you today, how is HitTail going to help if it's not stealing data from other people? I tried explaining how you "prime the pump" with about 100 posts of your own, then how the perfectly optimized mechanics of most blogging software, plus the long-page versions (the index and archive pages) draws in visitors on unlimited word combinations you've never thought of. This occurs merely because words from posts early in the month combine with words from posts at the end of the month if there's no better match to be found on the Internet. Probably the best I ever stated it was in this 30-second elevator pitch about HitTail.
Still, after all this, if someone refuses to understand that your own best competitive intelligence is to be gleaned from the activity on your own site, then they might be a lost cause. We can send them to the HitTail demo, or ask them to try the free service. Give it a try for a few months, and if they still don't get it, then they should leave it to their competitors. Picking up easy traffic in the long tail at a sufficient rate to achieve niche dominance is here to stay. It's the back door to success.
If it were really easy to understand, it wouldn't have taken a best selling book by Chris Anderson to teach the world. It would have been kept as a secret weapon by the likes of Amazon.com.
But a lot of people are going to be able to get it, and we want to make sure when they do, it's HitTail they discover fist. So, any of our fan-boys out there, be sure you're on our forum. And be ready for us to start reaching out to you to help you help us, so we can keep the free service free, and continue to revolutionize online marketing.
We had a successful SEO Super Powers meetup yesterday, considering the rain kept all but 4 non-Connors people away. With myself, my Connors posse, and Marshall Sponder (Webmetricsguru), Pauli Price of Sindex Systems and Rupali Shah of 24/7 Real Media, we discussed a broad array of issues, veering far off the Ajax + SEO subject for the night, but always returning to the theme of how to make business more successful. The life-span of SEO as we know it was estimated from anywhere from 2 to 5 years, with much talk of social media. Time was spent discussing whether or not blogging is SEO, and what the process might look like from someone initially discovering you, to building trust, to some sort of relationship (customer).
I feel that this meeting laid the foundation for future SEO Super Power meetups in NYC, where we will fully embrace, and perhaps even lead, what the field is becoming. Stay tuned for the information regarding the next meetup. And on a related note, I think I'll start getting out to some more of the meetups around New York. There's Technology, Entrepreneurship, Networking, Marketing, Programming, Graphic Design and the like. It's going to be a challenge pairing it down to a reasonable number to attend each month!
I know I need to get back to blogging on significant long tail marketing subject-matter (I've got my HitTail ToDo List), but I've been so busy. I could however not resist sharing this article with all of you, written by Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni. I met her a couple of times, first at Seth Godin's launch of The Dip, and second at Darren Rowse's (of ProBlogger) second Meetup here in NYC. It's sort of like a six degrees post, but tells a bit about who I am.
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.
Today, there was a major mention of HitTail in the Ventura County Star. Be sure to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt: Fred Simanek, chief executive officer of MyNextDeal.com in Thousand Oaks, uses both for his commercial real estate Web site.
Simanek said an important part of launching a new site is driving traffic to it. He found a product called HitTail, which gives Web site owners, whether casual bloggers or large businesses, a piece of code that tracks how people find their Web site.
It uses that information what keywords people used in which search engines to create a report for the site operator. That allows a business to incorporate the search terms into its Web site content so people using similar keyword searches in the future can find the company more easily.
It even creates a "to do" list.
Gaining intelligence
Simanek said he liked that it was so simple to use.
"Who doesn't want to have a to do list telling you, Here's some improvements you can make on your site,'" he said.
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.
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.
HitTail's 30 Second Elevator Pitch at SES NYC 2007
This was perhaps the best Search Engine Strategies (SES) I ever attended, in great part, instead of being one undifferentiated SEO in the crowd, I was Mike Levin the HitTail guy. Unlike previous years, where I attended all four days and came away with only enough to make it worth it, this time I only attended yesterday (Thursday), and came away with a lot. I mean, an awful lot.
I'd love to share all the funny anecdotes that were packed into just one day. But the first thing I want to get out of my mind and into the blogosphere is the highly effective 30-second elevator pitch.
HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts -- to help you grow your natural search traffic... free.
It works much like analytics software with a simple line of JavaScript code. For users of major platforms (Blogger, TypePad and WordPad), there are plug-ins to facilitate installation of the code, making it easy for even total newbies.
Every website has some search-life in it. Every website is trying to tell you something.
Most analytics packages overlook the most important event: when some determined visitor finds you buried several pages into search. This tells you two things:
1. There is actual traffic occurring on this term, and you CAN/ARE being found on it. 2. There are several pages of crap ahead of you which didn’t satisfy the visitor. The hit was probably coincidental, often a result of unlikely word combos from archive pages.
So the reasoning goes, if you intentionally target it, you can bring yourself from several pages in on that term to the first page.
Keep this up over time, and you will grow your search engine traffic, naturally. It may even free you (being marketers) from reliance on Google AdWords to drive traffic.
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.
This may be a fleeting occurrence based on the rapid recent construction of links to the HitTail site as a result of some very high-profile coverage (thanks, John!).
But yes, we come up very high right now on the single word "demo".
I only know this because someone clicked through on it about 5 minutes ago, and HitTail issued it as a suggestion.
We debated over whether to allow single-words to ever reach the suggestion tab on their own. And after long deliberation, we've decided to call them out under the Keywords tab, but not move them to suggestions, because of the futility of working them up.
But now having HitTail appear for the word "demo" in Google 4 pages in, I am sorely tested. It is at least worth HitTailing one post. I particularly liked the double-entendre of the headline I got to use.
But the rub is that Google is particularly sensitive to the RATE at which links are being constructed. So if a whole bunch of links just got created to us on the term "demo", it pushes us up short-term for the word demo.
This is a warning we always give to our clients. Don't get too excited with brand-new eerily cool results. The elation is premature. Premature Googlelation?
WOW, I would have loved to have used THAT as the headline. But the idea here is to get into the path of pre-existing traffic patterns with the headline alone. So, the headline is really where you need to make as few compromises as possible on word choice and arrangement from the HitTail suggestion.
There are a few things to point out.
The process of discovering where we position on a word we're not yet monitoring, is sometimes known as Passive Rank Analysis. Some competitors make a big deal of this as a feature, because it reduces the need to proactively spider the search results, and therefore violate the terms of use of most search engines, or alternatively, use their API, where the results are not necessarily the same as a genuine search.
Well, we've never made a big deal of passive rank analysis. We just figured that's how HitTail should work. It's not about tracking positions of your known keywords (benchmarks). Instead, it's about reporting on the activity of ACTUAL keyword hits (actuals). HitTail lives in the actuals.
The next point here is that Connors regularly gets the coveted one-word keywords for our clients. We thought long and hard before making this statement, but yes, we have several hard-and-fast cases. The downside is that one-word keywords, as cool as they are, are actually less significant than one may think, as they are excessively general, and don't necessarily produce the targeted traffic you desire. But none-the-less, it's desirable, because you're in a much better position on that word plus any other word.
A third point to make here is that I thought our one-word "root" for which we ascended was going to be "long" or "tail" or the made-up "longtail". And indeed, we're rising on all three (page 3 for just tail). But picking up a strong position on the term "demo" is just a logical bonus.
I had locked myself in a room for a week to make the long tail demo of which they speak. And it was apparently a very worthwhile endeavor, and worth the effort, as we are referred to as the way to understand long tail thinking (aside from Chris' book, of course). Or perhaps as the fastest pitch evah. It could be that the YouTube version has thousands of views, and is joining the ranks of viral video in terms of pure reach. Or maybe, people recognize it as one of the most creative demos and websites they ever came across.
And finally, it's really unrealistic to take the steps one would have to take from an SEO standpoint at this point to fortify HitTail on the term, demo. We're just not in the business of demos (though we're repeatedly asked). The work it would take to truly fortify a one-word term is ridiculous; landing page 4 is one thing, but the increased resistance encountered as you creep up the SERPs is enormous.
I'd be spending all my time doing that instead of doing it for paying Clients, or blogging for the HitTail community.
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.
Writing copy all over the Internet is getting mangled in the name of search engine optimization. HitTail aims to bring back the lost art of writing well, by excusing you from targeting the most competitive terms. These are the terms that make you jump through hoops and do backflips in order to move up by one page, tweaking keyword densities, moving words around on the page, and otherwise doing things a good writer shouldn't.
Back in the days of print, this criteria was known as "word count", and The New York Times joke was "All the news that fits, we print." A play on their motto "All the news that's fit to print."
Well, today's online world has the equivalent. If you're not being found through Google, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. That might be an overstatement, as running things on the homepage of massively popular sites is a viable alternative to a Google search. But who gets their stuff run on the homepage of the NYT or MSN websites? That's why Digg has become so massively popular so quickly. It gives the little guy a fighting chance, without being beholden to Google or other big media.
Even the old-school big-media guys are giving up their beloved double entendre headlines, in favor of matter-of-fact headline. Every few months, big media runs a story about how headlines have to just get to the facts, because it's generally the headlines that show in Google. And if it's not DIRECTLY about what you're looking for, it's not going to get the click.
So, how does HitTail remedy this?
First, you must understand that there are 2 types of matter-of-fact headlines...
1. Those that will get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic easily. 2. Those that will never get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic.
That's right. It's all a grab for pre-existing traffic patterns. No one is going to search on what you wrote about BECAUSE you wrote about it. The cause/effect relationship is exactly the reverse off what most people think.
People will find you because what you wrote about GETS IN THEIR PATH.
Being a cat-owner, never was this as clearly demonstrated to me as the outbreak of poison cat-food. It was a massive pattern of traffic that never existed before. But when the story broke, everyone started searching on it. Then more and more pages popped up getting into the path of those surfers. An entrepreneurial cat food manufacturer would have had dozens of pages out there explaining how their cat food is guaranteed safe, complete with an online ordering form. They could have had a windfall, but probably missed their window by now. I know there's not pages like that out there, because I didn't find them. They're targeting the wrong--or too small--of a list of keywords and phrases.
Once you construct a headline that you KNOW will tap into pre-existing traffic (thanks to HitTail suggestions), it frees you up to write well on the rest of the page. Imagine the burden of knowing that all that SEO criteria for getting the search hit simply goes away. Writers can do what they do best: write. And because writers write to be read, they can have peace of mind, because they know they will be read, simply by virtue of selecting an effective headline.
So don't simply write your headlines in a matter-of-fact style to appease search. Write your headlines KNOWING you're tapping into pre-existing traffic corridors. Or as a speculative alternative, write about topics that you KNOW WILL have the traffic patterns. Can you say, Election 2007? That reminds me, political bloggers should really be using HitTail to raise their voice above the fray of the noisy blogosphere. But that's another story.
Explaining what HitTail is is strangely all-consuming. In the HitTail demo, we emphasize the point that we're not analytics software, though everybody keeps asking. We're a writing suggestion tool. WE... JUST... DO... SUGGESTIONS!
Now that we have a critical mass of blog posts built up, HitTail itself starts to give us suggestions.
And one such suggestion is "best writing topics".
As usual, HitTail reaffirms the funny fact that the collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd far exceeds any single person, or even a group of people's ability to brainstorm keywords. It even exceeds the ability of keyword suggestion tools, such as the keyword inventory tools built into AdWords and Yahoo Panama, to guess what's going to UNIQUELY produce for YOU.
Let me explain that.
Your website is already a keyword suggestion box. You're just not listening to the suggestions, if you're not using HitTail yet. So, how are HitTail's keyword suggestions better than anyone else's?
Because we're selecting the best writing topics for that title field or headline field of your blogging software. Simply work the HitTail keyword suggestion into a sensible headline that works within the context of your site, and you have the best topic for drawing in new audience.
We know this, because we've proven it time and time again with our own SEO clients. The HitTailing technique was so reliable, in fact, and underutilized within the context of a hand-full of high-end Connors clients, that we decided to let the world participate. Now, we're literally responsible for thousands of people optimizing tens-of-thousands of topics, bringing in highly qualified prospects, and hopefully converting them into customers and audience.
Indeed, within a few years, we hope to have helped hundreds of thousands of writers raise their voice above the din, and draw in millions of new prospects and readers.
It's undeniable. Keyword tools are everywhere, and everyone's spinning their own version and working them into their pay-per-click campaign marketing dashboards. Third party tools harvest keywords from second-tier search sites, such as InfoSpace's WebCrawler. First-party tools incorporate Yahoo results into Panama and Google results into the AdSense fetures--known as keyword inventory tools, with the added bonus of reporting keyword traffic stats and monetary value. And some keyword tools even do their own crawls, harvesting keywords off of competitor's sites, search results, APIs, or yank them right out of the datastream, in cooperation with participating ISPs.
Yes, there are unlimited numbers of ways to come up with keyword lists to help with your natural and paid search campaigns.
But we like ours.
It's simplistic in its conception, to the point of strange.
Yet it's effective in practice, to the point of unfair.
And that technique is harvesting keywords right from your website's own logfiles. But instead of merely pulling "the long keyword list" as so many analytics products allow, we pair down the list with at least two passes, so you don't have to.
And for anyone whose done serious keyword research, you can appreciate how much time this saves you. You get YOUR BEST LIST of keywords to target before you even export anything to Excel.
Think about that for a minute.
If you don't get it, forward the link to this article to someone in online marketing who you trust, who you think might get it. Ask them how creative and time-saving they thing this is. Ask them how it might improve your online marketing campaigns, and indeed, your life--by giving you time back for your families, hobbies and friends. Think how it could make your boss love you, those around you admire you, and take you one tiny step closer to being indispensable.
Exactly HOW does this radically different keyword research work flow happen?
We take the precious time that keyword geeks are flushing down the toilet by saving all their log files forever, running complex Regular Expression matches against them, ensuring that the work it suggests isn't duplicating work you've already done--and we distill it all down to one little Suggestions tab.
That's a long way of saying: "We tell you what to write about."
When the story of HitTail first broke, co-founder of Wired Magazine, John Battelle, was a little dubious about this "telling you what to write about stuff". And what good editor and writer wouldn't be? It sounds like one more spam-promoting tool to shift even more power into the hands of disingenuous bloggers just making a traffic-grab to increase their AdSense beer money.
But we held firm, by not creating an API that would allow spam-mash-ups. We held firm, by teaching our users about quality and distinctive online voices resulting in long-term reputations. We held firm by practicing HitTailing ourselves, demonstrating how just because you know you're going to get the traffic by mere virtue of smart headline selection, doesn't mean you can fill a page with garbage. We held firm by positioning it as a tool for reputable bloggers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) striving to get and keep customers directly, instead of yet-another-SEO-tool for AdSensers.
So here we are, as the one tool that consistently gets mentioned side-by-side with Google Analytics as the one must-have piece of tracking code. If you're only going to run two things to help improve your website, then those two things should be Google Analytics and HitTail. And that only makes sense, because would Google ever provide you a keyword tool that would increase your natural search performance, and bring down the cost of your AdWords campaigns?
Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen and the Suggestion Box
OK, just one quick blog post today, as I dive deep into my work. I likely won't be checking email much today, or taking phone-calls, as I have to finish some very large deliverables for a client. But I wanted to get a post out on one of the topics that has been coming up over and over.
Yes, HitTail suggests what to write about.
Yes, HitTail does this based on the existing activity on your site.
Yes, blogging software helps--particularly the long archive and index pages.
But exactly HOW this process works has not been sufficiently addressed. We've been referring people more and more frequently to this diagram.
So, as you see, "seed" content is required to get the HitTailing process going. If you don't have a product, you don't have a product to improve. There needs to be a website and pages there in the first place. Yes, we understand HitTail is a tempting way to "start the build", but you must start the build using your own imagination, expertise, or other keyword suggestion tools, like WordTracker or the inventory suggestion tools.
Get out about 100 seed posts.
And once your site is seeded, HitTail will start issuing suggestions. And you can focus on constantly improving quality, by "answering" the suggestions popping up under the Suggestions tab, as surely as if it were a Suggestion Box! But if your suggestions are not good enough, then maybe it's time to "spiral out" to new concepts, such as I am doing with this post. I have mentioned Edwards Demming, TQM and the Japanese concept of Kaizen plenty. Yet, very little hits based on it. Consequently, this is a post to remind everyone that HitTail isn't merely analytics software. It's part of a website total quality management campaign.
Of all these Wikipedia links, I most suggest reading the entry on Kaizen. Pay attention to the continuous improvement in tandem with a respect for people.
This is why you take HitTail suggestions to build natural search traffic, but ONLY when they make sense in the context of your site, and REALLY DO improve your website. This post is a perfect example. I need to get these keywords into a headline, but I'm not going to waste your time. Now, you know why Japan made a massive economic comeback after WWII, and how these concepts translate directly into website management and online marketing techniques today.
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.
Sometimes HitTail skeptics think that ALL HitTail is advocating is writing well using blogging software. Yes, that's how we recommend that the mainstream marketer or everyday blogger get started. Your funding permitting, we would love to have you onboard as an SEO client, where we employ some of the following techniques...
We perform XSL-to-HTML transformations from corporate asset data sources. We call this the slice & dice presentation layer (SDPL), and it's one-of-a-kind in the industry, wherein we install a completely new "presentation layer" to your existing content management system. In this way, we can optimize your site using the most cutting-edge techniques of the day, and re-optimize as often as necessary to keep pace with the changing state of search. Booyah!
Another technique we use is the "blogification" of any website. The idea here is that blogging software has SO MUCH of an edge over traditional content management systems, that we work our clients through a series of projects to level the playing field. They include search friendly URLs, archive pages, internal link structure, on-page elements, RSS feeds, ping notifications, and all the rest of the artifacts that make blogging software so potent.
And yet another technique we use is social media optimization (SMO), in which we become as much of an expert in our client's space as the client themselves. In this way, we can monitor every development in the blogosphere (and online in general), anticipate every pitfall that a client is likely to encounter, and proactively address it before the problem even hits. At worst, we're fixing problems before they're hours old.
Yes, we do some kick-ass things at Connors, and HitTail is merely our overture to the mainstream world of marketing, who are chomping at the bit to get started with natural search. Blogging software in combination with HitTail is simply a convenient way of getting things started.
Through HitTail, we are establishing regular relationships with hundreds-of-thousands of people. Of these, some will be happy with our basic (indeed, FREE) offering, while others will upgrade. A small few will become direct Connors clients, as Amazon.com, Priceline.com, Real Networks, Disney.com, NationalGeographic.com, and many more have.
So, if you're thinking we're saying "blog it and forget it", we're not.
Instead, we're saying "Hi, it's great to meet you. Try this. It's free."
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.
Welcome to another reason to love HitTail--an honest measure of how active your site is...
...among NEW visitors!
We took almost 8 months to decide what that traffic level was going to be under which HitTailing remains free. And we categorized just about every website in creation into this free category. You can find this as your "Visits/Month" figure under the "My Account" tab.
Impossible, you say? My sites is WAY over 100K hits/mo. you say? And we're only reporting 5,000? Well, let us explain why we might be the only honest traffic monitoring tool company you deal with. The spoiler is that we only count initial referrers and search hits against this number, de-duped based on user sessions.
That's so much mumbo-jumbo for most people. So, if you're a tech-head and don't get it, read on.
If you're NOT a tech-head, forward this to one of your buddies who is, and they'll explain it to you.
We must open the discussion with the fact that almost every number quoted in measuring web traffic is SUBJECTIVE. Let me count the ways...
First, there are infinite "paths" through the Internet whenever you load a web page, so no one in that path can accurately measure the overall traffic to any given site. Not even the ISPs and companies, like HitWise, who strike deals with those ISPs. They have part of the picture, but not all. Folks like AT&T and Level 3 who sit on big chunks of the "series of tubes" that comprise the Internet are in a slightly better position to measure this... but they don't... at least not for YOUR purposes.
Second, there are "caches" all over the Internet, keeping the TRUE page-load activity unclear. There are caches at the local level (your own PC), cashes along the way (squid), and cashes at the hosting level by content distribution networks, such as Akamai and Panther. And finally, your own ISPs, such as AOL also cache. There's just no way that even your own web log files contain the true referrers. This is why so many tracking systems such as HitTail rely on JavaScript-based code embedded into the HTML pages themselves to overcome this caching problem. It's marginally more accurate.
Third, even once you have a decent record of activity on your website, there's the artful process of filtering it down to MEANINGFUL traffic and an OBJECTIVE measure of hits. The problem is that there are spiders and crawlers belonging to Google and other content-monitoring companies all over your site looking like users. To make it worse, for every page-load, there is sometimes dozens more hits as the graphics for the page are also fetched for the same user. In fact, here was a time when people would quote "hits" as just a count of the number of lines in their log files, in which case sites with lots of small graphics would be totally overinflated. Even with the best of intentions, deriving an HONEST and OBJECTIVE measure of hits is a subjective and artful practice.
With all that background, it's time for...
...even MORE background! Sorry, but it's got to be done in order for you to understand why HitTail is so much more honest, and therefore better, than other systems at measuring unqiues and therefore giving you unique insight into the minds of your prospective audience and customers.
It's why HitTail under-reports hits, and is therefore better (better in this context, where we're asking you to take actions to make that number go up).
Once you strip out all the garbage of Web crawlers and graphics loads, you are left with a nearly-objective count of uniques, right? Wrong, what you've got is a nearly-objective count of page-views (sometimes also known as page-loads, which I'll user interchangeably). For you see, there are TWO nearly-objective numbers for the activity on any website. And NEITHER ONE is a count of uniques. The first, is he aforementioned count of page-views. The other is the count of initial referrers.
Initial referrers are sort of like uniques, in that for every visit to a website, there is only one page-load that was your first page-load of the session. And IF you came from somewhere else on the web, that page-load carries a piece of data known as the initial referrer. 9 times out of 10, this is Google, for well-optimized sites. 9 times out of 10, this is the first person to link to you for brand-new sites. As sites age, their initial referrers gradually shifts from being "non-search" links to "Google hits". And the initial referrer number is maybe 10 times smaller than your page-view count described above.
"But wait!" cry all the experienced Web marketers out there. If the average page-views per session for a website visitor is 5, then how can initial referrers be 10-times less? Shouldn't it only be 5-times less?
The answer comes in all those bookmarked pages, links in email, and websites that are directly typed-into the browser (factoring out social bookmark websites and web-based email, which DO carry initial referrers). And there's a heck of a lot of these referrer-less visitors--at least as many as come from links and search engines. These "initial referrer-less" visits are completely invisible to HitTail, as they carry no competitive keyword intelligence. But once you've subtracted out subsequent page-loads by the same visitor AND initial referrer-less visitors, you have about 1/10th your page-load number. And you also have a nearly-objective number, known as initial referrers. And finally, THAT'S what HitTail cares about, measures, and reports in the Search Hits tab.
So, if a site receives the nearly-objective number of 1 million page-loads per month, chances are that your initial referrer number is going to be about 100,000, and exactly the HitTail cut-off for a high-volume site. If your site has 10,000 page-view per month, then your initial referrer number is probably about 1,000, and disappointingly lower than you might have thought. And FAR from the HitTail cut-off for free service.
But we DO have our share of HitTail users in this 1,000 initial referrers/month range that contact us in a panic because their "high volume" site is going to be over the limit, and they're worried they'll be forced to pay. Sometimes, you have a site with a small base of incredibly addicted users. The site owners think they're sitting on an active-site gold mine for advertisers, who pay based on page-loads. But the truth is, they have a tiny, fanatical group of readers, and nearly NO INFLUX OF NEWBIES--which, in the end, are the lifeblood of any site.
And so simply put, HitTail's measure of uniques is our measure of initial referrers--which we call "Visits/Month" under the "My Account" tab. The only difference between our "unique" and other analytics software companies' version of uniques is the delusion that cross-session persistent cookies can be trusted. They can't. They violate privacy. We don't use 'em. And initial referrers is so close to other peoples' count of uniques, that it's not worth the trouble.
As a result, HitTail triggers off no security warnings. Our non-persistent cookie, required only to "hush" HitTail and network chatter subsequent to the initial referrer event, makes for the most polite and lightweight tracking system on the Internet.
You should feel good about adding HitTail as that "one more piece of code." It's the one more piece of code you SHOULD use, because we planned it that way.
And you should also feel good about how we report how active your site is. Because if someone is telling you that your site is optimized, and HitTail tells you you've only got 5,000 visitors/month, well then, you're not as well optimized as you think.
And thanks to Jon of WickedFire, and one of the best Affliliate Marketing guys I know, for prompting me to make this post. He wanted us to show that our Visits/Month number was a measure of Search Hits, and not Page-Loads, as many affiliate programs use.
For all you TypePad junkies who have been cramming the HitTail code into a line list, we've just made it easier for you. We have just created a TypePad widget, and been accepted into the TypePad Gallery. Make it popular, so we get accepted onto the TypePad Recommended Widgets list. Thanks to Dave Berkowitz of 360i and Search Insider for originally suggesting it.
HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.
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."
Come read the article by my boss, Connie Connors, the woman who REALLY brought you HitTail. I may be grabbing a lot of the spotlight, but this wouldn't have happened had I not hitched my apple cart to this star. First, she recognized the changes that were occuring in public relations and decided to lead instead of follow. Second, she knows how to get press for exciting new endeavors. Case in point, we were in BusinessWeek not once, but twice. First, for building a better mouse trap, and later for being one of the most important new ideas of 2006.
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.
For those who haven't noticed yet, HitTail is now translated into Deutsch, Francias, Nederlands and Italien. Connors already has a reputation for international SEO, but now we're enabling millions of bloggers worldwide to optimize for the long tail of search in their own languages. So, you thought your long tail was long in English? Have you thought about the fact that if you have an international market for your product or service, you may have a long tail in the language of each?
Seems difficult? Yes. Yes, it is.
I'm not going to sugar-coat it. SEO becomes proportionally more difficult with each language you target. This is why PPC is such a good idea for international search marketing. You only have to naturally optimize your native language site, and a few landing pages. Then, you translate your keyword list and drop it into AdWords or Panama. The amount you have to translate is reduced, and you don't have to deal with the complexity of translating language-specific idioms.
So, is optimizing for natural search in foreign languages a hopeless task? Do you have to translate your entire website, and keep all the varying versions in sync?
Nonsense! This is yet another advantage of using blogging software for natural search. No one is going to expect you to go back and retroactively translate blog posts to keep them in sync. Blog posts are sort of an imprinted memory of what you were thinking at the time. It gets you off the hook. Your blog posts in different languages don't even need to say the same thing. Merely, the headlines should be rough equivalents of each topic you're targeting.
In other words, you only need the headlines to match in each language. And even that is a rough estimate, because the keywords you SHOULD be targeting could vary in each market, based on culture and nuance. So, how do you know which keywords you should target in each language?
Hmmmm, let's see...
You could use... HitTai!
That's right. Do you need a way to truth-check what your native language-speaking translators are telling you? Translate some initial "seed" content into each language. Make sure your most-important benchmark keywords are included somewhere in the copy of those translations. Then, ask your native language translator to translate your blogs into each language as you go.
There will reach a point where the data being collected by HitTail will give you new insights into the local markets. These insights may show you that you were totally off base in your initial translations.
Case in point: we refer to natural search as the elephant in the room of any online marketing discussion. Why? Because all roads lead you to "buying" your traffic. Some of the powers-that-be would love to close that lovely loophole whereby quality content producers still get their traffic for free. Who gets anything for free in this world? Who would make a product that lets you get something for free, and provides that product for free? We did it. And now we're telling you how we did it. But our elephant doesn't translate, because it's an American English idiom. What's an idiom? Shooting from the hip, I'd say it was an expression that makes sense because of cultural context. But then, I'd be flying by the seat of my pants. Our elephant in the corner of the room, somehow becomes a pink elephant in translation. So, our unspoken natural search friend becomes an alcoholic delusion. Anyone who has listened to the English-to-Japanese translations translated back to English knows exactly what I mean. If you haven't had this experience, it's a necessary experience for any online marketer dealing with language translations.
The bottom line is that, thanks to HitTail and long tail search marketing techniques, the actual copy on the page doesn't have to be long to be effective. Take advantage of that fact, and put your limited translation resources into culturally-correct headlines. Then, either translate very little on the page itself, or find yourself a native language-speaking blogger who can translate the essence of your posts. Do this for the first bunch of posts that you've already made, then see what suggestions start coming in. Adjust your new foreign language posts to make the most of HitTail suggestions and cultural context. Forget about translating the bulk of your main website into every language, unless you've really got that sort of resources. Let each language-specific blog take on a life of its own. This is like how Coke allows it's regional companies to adapt their offerings for each country.
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.
What is your website trying to tell you? A new service from PR firm Connors Communications covered in this week's Business Week (p. 16, Building a Better Mousetrap) and in John Battelle's Search Blog last Friday tries to tell us. And if you state long enough, maybe you can see the Woman in Red.
(See the HitTail Widget over to the right of this post)
Have you ever found yourself asking what activity is going on on your website, but you've been disappointed by having to endure that day-long wait to find out what happened yesterday? If you have, then you may want to check out this service.
The same is true if any of your pages ever got Dugg and and you sat there wondering what activity was going on on your site. HitTail allows you to watch the real-time flow of clicks. Even non-techies can sit back watching the patterns and deriving meaning.
A couple of my pages were on Digg yesterday and they had the HitTail code and the system captured data perfectly. The Search Hits tab was really moving like you how it in the YouTube movie!
HitTail filters out all the page-to-page clicks and multiple re-clicks from the same user, so what you have is an almost perfect view of uniques -- or the influx of genuine first time visitors. This gives you a pretty good idea in absolute terms how many people visited your site as a result of getting dugg.
You get the added benefit of seeing which searches are leading to your site as they happen. Ajax is used to give you that feeling that you always wanted to get by just loading your log file into a text editor. You know new activity is going on. You just can't see it because of the way text editors work. HitTail has acheived a unique real-time view where they're managing millions of records in an a responsive Ajax datagrid, with no data pre-processing to wait for as with most analytic software.
In addition to the real-time search hit view, the service mines those keywords for the best candidate topics for new blog posts as far as drawing in new traffic to your website through search. It does this by analyzing the hits that actually did occur, and picking out the ones that are likely to come up on the first page of results if turned into the headline of a blog post. At very least, it's greater insight into the search terms that are leading people to your site.
This is a process not only applicable to business blogs fishing for customers, but its also great political blogs, technology blogs, social causes and non-profits, or people simply trying to extend their influence on a topic. It's an extra little blogging edge.
We joke that it's like immersing yourself in the data flow, like The Matrix. But its surprisingly more true than you may think. Based on how we highlight the keywords to construct that "river of black" (or in this example, neon green) in your Search Hits tab (the referrer stream), it is eerily plausible to say you might get into the zone and see that woman in red.
And the best part is that you don't even have to be a techie to do it.
No wait! The best part is that it's free.
To help you really understand what's going on here, how it relates to the long tail concept, and how to get started HitTailing, the site has...
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