I'm Trying Out Hittail - Part 2

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I had installed Hittail on this blog, in order to get a better sense of what subjects my readers are interested in. I wanted to see which topics the Hittail engine would recommend that I focus on.

Well, after a week, I took the next step and installed it on several higher traffic blogs.

So far, the results are encouraging....and somewhat addictive for the compulsive web-analyst. (Did I mention I'm thinking of starting a support group for marketers who feel compelled to while away their nights studying emerging user trends?)

At the office, we've taken a couple of (I think) exciting steps to align our editorial and marketing efforts, and the Hittail application is playing a role in that process. It is helping us to determine which stories to feature, allowing us to craft more targeted headlines (both to improve SEO and the user experience), and increasing our awareness of which keyword phrases we should be monitoring position and optimizing for.

A Word on the Hittail Suggestions Tool

Hittail provides suggestions as to which keywords your website should focus on optimizing for. As a self-professed metrics junkie, I've wasted a few thoughtcycles pondering the algorithm that identifies words.

Hittail is about the longtail strategy, so the recommendations are not based on keyword volume. Some of the words it has selected are pretty obscure, so it doesn't seem to be any kind of keyword clustering. From what I can hypothesize, it seems to select words for which your site appears fairly low in the rankings, but for which you still managed to attract a visitor (implying that those who ranked above you provided unsatisfactory results for the motivated searcher). Presumably, I guess, if you could improve you rankings on these phrases, you would attract much more of this type of motivated/previously unsatisfied traffic to your site.

I have no real idea if this is how it works. I'll be posting to the forums at hittail.com to see if I can ferret out an answer. Meanwhile, I can recommend the tool, and report that it is proving useful for me on numerous levels. You can download it



Anyone else out there using hittail? How are you implementing its recommendations?