If you’re at a loss about what you want to blog on your next post, worry no more. HitTail will, through analyzed searches and visits to your site, provide you with Suggestions that can help you increase traffic to your blog. HitTail supposedly works better than PPC in improving your web site ranking. Or so it claims.
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.
By utilizing a radically improved method for managing long lists on the Web, HitTail zeros right in on that data, showing you every search hit that has led to your site and then pulls out the keywords. HitTail then uses sophisticated algorithms to pull out underperforming terms as suggestions, which you may or may not choose to move into your to do list and act on. The more you take action by writing about these promising topics, the more your site snowballs.
The term long tail is often used in statistics. In the case of web site searching, long tail refers to the lesser-known terms related to the keyword that you searched. Theoretically, the combined traffic of these lesser-known terms may actually become higher than the most popular-used keywords, like so:
If you have used the Google Adwords Keyword Tool before, you may have noticed the suggested keywords that have low keyword search volume — those are the long tails. Take, for example, the word blogging. Related terms like blogs and blogger have high search volumes, whereas terms like pink is the new blog and underground blogs are just two terms that have almost nonexistent search volumes. Take a look carefully at the list, though. Among the 200 keywords or so generated for the term blogging, more than half of those are ranked as having low search volume.
To have HitTail work for you, here’s how to do it:
I’m trying it right now. I registered on the 13th of this month, and when I checked back on the 14th, there wasn’t any Suggestions, or Hits, as they call it. I assumed that although I had around 40 site hits on that same day, HitTail didn’t take them into its analysis since most of my traffic come from referrals, such as MyBlogLog, Technorati, and several other sites that I frequently visit.
It’s been 10 days, and sure enough, HitTail finally has something to show me. The snapshot below shows a summary of the popular keywords used. Basically, my search engine visits come from people looking for info on a famous Malaysian reality show, WordPress Top Commentator widget, Adman, and a censored Harry Potter keyword (oh dear)!
From there, can you guess what topics HitTail suggested? 😉
HitTail suggested me to blog on a famous Malaysia reality show and some naughty Harry Potter keyword!
In any case, I see this as a promising tool, and I especially love the Hit Suggestions section, no matter how outrageous its suggestion can be at times. Leave me your comments and thoughts on HitTail if you decide to use it.
By the way, I found out about HitTail by looking at the web site ads while visiting my visitors’ blogs (remember my previous post?). Hah!
Check out my other posts: « Matt Harding’s 4-minute globethrottling / A country of your own »
Another one like that is 103bees.com. It has also a feature to show you the rankings a search term has. Knowing that 75% of the search engine traffic comes from the first page of results, it’s worth working on the keywords that are only on the second or third page of the search results to get Google listing them on the first page.
Thanks for the link, Thomas. From what I’ve read so far, 103bees has the same functionalities as HitTail does, with the exception of the Hit Suggestions, which picks up on potential keywords we should use to improve our search hits. Although you can obviously get the same information from the search term ranking, HitTail helps take out the guessworks for dum-dums like me and straight away pinpoints these goldmines.
I appreciate your thoughts. Maybe you should do a post if you’re using 103bees.
I think there’s another difference, 103bees has different lists for keywords and search terms. It’s only a small difference but with keywords you can find the most important word better.
I’m tempted to try 103bees just so that I can have a detailed look at its features, but maybe a bit later until I get the hang of HitTail. Comparatively, HitTail focuses not on just important keywords, but potential ones that can help snowball the search traffic, which I like.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Hey Lorna! 🙂 Yea, I remember posting a comment on the HitTail post, then I came back the next day and I noticed the post is gone.
Honestly, I thought you deleted it and you hated my comments. 🙁
Hmm.. maybe your host provider did some reboot on their server and accidentally deleted it? I dunno la.. just a wild guess. Hopefully it’s just some error.
Do you have any suggestions as to how I could track whether the fault came from me or the hosting provider? I mean, I did attempt to modify the post a little before it went nada. Surely it’s impossible to figure out if I did accidentally delete my post, that the comments as well as the uploaded images get affected? Does WordPress delete related comments and images when one deletes a post?
Wow…this looks like it could be very useful…we could all use a little keyword assistance!
Matt of eJabs.com
Hey Lorna…can you change my “commenting name” to Matthew Jabs so all my comments are under the same name? It’s what I usually use…sorry for the confusion!
Matt of eJabs.com
Done! 🙂
Hi, and thanks for the mention of HitTail! We like to think of ourselves as a writing topic suggestion tool, but a lot of people like the real-time features. Anyway, feel free to post any questions for me here if you’ve got them.
I appreciate you developing and making HitTail available to us, Mike. I look forward to your future enhancements, and I’ll be sure to share my thoughts and feedbacks on HitTail to help improve it.
Also, thanks for adding this post to StumbleUpon.com, I hope other visitors find this post as useful.
Thanks, Lorna, I just registered. I guess I’ll check tomorrow to see how I’m doing. 🙂
Thanks…a very detail explanation on this service…may give it a try when I got the time..Thanks
This looks like it could be extremely useful, especially when your having an off day and can’t think of anything to write about.