Online SEO Hittail Service Taps Long Tail To Get Better Organic Search Results: Good or Bad?
A new SEO service makes it possible for bloggers as well as for small and medium-sized online publishers to easily identify keywords combinations already present in their web site content, which if further "leveraged" by building further "doctored" content around them could provide one of the most cost-effective increase in qualified traffic and potential click-through achievable.
Photo credit: Hittail applies the Long Tail concept to natural SEO - is this good?
The service, called Hittail, actually doesn't like to be classified as a SEO service, as it wants to clearly position itself as a more natural "alternative" to traditional SEO, which generally involves a lot more complexity and specialist know-how to be carried out effectively.
In essence, Hittail focuses on applying the Long Tail paradigm to your own web site or blog pages. If you utilize some form of monetization mechanism, like Google AdSense, Hittail can help you identify set of keywords, or keyphrases, that you can focus on to write new articles.
The "suggestions" made by Hittail are nothing else but very specific content topics on which you have already proven to be a source of information for others (Hittail has tracked people coming to your site and searching for those very specific information items - so more will come in the future). These Hittail suggestions are also likely to be niche topics, which much less aggressive SEO competition, and a lot less sites vying for the top search results.
By increasing your awareness of what these topics are and writing new posts / articles that include those very keywords / keyphrases in the title and in the body of it, you basically guarantee yourself increased traffic on that topic.
Why would you want to focus on keywords / keyphrases that bring in so little traffic relative to your more popular ones?
Because the Long Tail paradigm shows that when inventory is not restricted and when access is made equally easy, the aggregated number of your less popular pages will drive an overall greater amount of targeted traffic than your most popular ones.
How can that be?
Though when you look at your traffic statistics you may see only a handful of articles from your site that receive a very significant amount of traffic, in most cases, it is the remaining set of, of less popular articles that all together may drive the majority of the your daily visitors.
"HitTail is not your path to achieving the top positions on the most competitive terms. Rather, HitTailing is about living in the fringes, where natural uncompromised writing stands a very good chance of seizing the top positions on a relentlessly growing list of meaningful terms that drive qualified traffic. HitTailing encourages you to win battles while they are still easy."
To "hittail" effectively you need to be using some "blogging" or "personal publishing software" like Blogger.com, Typepad, Movable Type, Wordpress or similar tools.
These online publishing tools are particularly effective because they allow the publishers and writers to affect directly the title tag, URL, headline, and anchor text of their articles, without needing to rely on an external technical support department.
Once registered to the service Hittail provides you with a snippet of code that needs to be inserted inside all of the pages of your site. With personal publishing systems like the above, this is generally achieved by simply adding the code to the default HTML template for your site articles.
Once the code is in place, Hittail indexes and tracks your content and the visitors/referrers/keywords bringing traffic to it, and then starts reporting to you
See now what Hittail will report to you by looking at this live demo implementation of Hittail on the Connors website (the makers of Hittail).
Pros:
If you are in to find untapped, low-cost ways to increase your traffic and exposure to major search engines without playing tech-based tricks inside the code of your web pages, Hittail does provide a good helping hand.
If you cover multiple and highly diverse topics on your site and want to improve the monetization levels of some of your content, Hittail can help as well.
If you have a website but no webmaster, little technical knowledge and have a craving for optimizing somehow your online publishing effectiveness, "hittailing" may be one of the ways to consider testing as converting unimportant themes and article topics into tools to consolidate your presence, revenue and visibility online is certainly within Hittail capabilities.
Cons:
Small online publishers are often too eager to make a quick buck rather than building an information service that is truly useful for other people. There are already thousands of blogs and small news sites that, based on similar "natural" SEO principles clutter the blogosphere, the web and most search engine results, while offering very little usefulness.
Expecting individuals to be ethical while we offer them the best ideas and tools for how not to be so, seems a contradiction in terms, though I'd like to be proven wrong on this one.
While I fully agree with the fact that bloggers and online publishers should make enormous improvements to how they title their content and tag their posts, I think that their ability to leverage unique and open information niches is something they need to do "before" they dive into creating a blog or news site.
While this may not happen automatically all the times, even if you realize your passion and related niche after two years of casual blogging, nothing makes it hard for you to start a new site on that newly found theme.
That is why, in my humble view, "hittailing after the fact", may lead to a lot of non-ethical use of this smart new tool.
Writing new posts driven by keyphrases that are in great part disconnected to your key focus, is generally not what I would recommend doing. But I acknowledge that there may be some gems in those "Suggestions" list and that novice online publishers, yet unfamiliar with the issues of leveraging specific keywords and keyphrases to increase their search engine relevance may find this very simple to use service extremely helpful.
Much less so, for seasoned online marketers.
Here the official Hittail concept explained by the guys who have launched the service:
More info about Hittail and SEO.
Hittail live demo. (free access)
Hittail blog - (valuable info here)
Hittail registration page.
(free while in Beta,, later free only if your traffic will not exceed a specified threshold)
What do you think?
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