Emerging Keyword Trends With Hittail and Blogpulse

How do you identify appropriate keywords phrases when they are only hours or days old?

Take the phrase "subprime crisis" for instance, or "global food crisis". These are subjects that have only recently been thrust into the public consciousness. Language is constantly evolving, but SEO experts need to be ahead of the curve.

Using keyword research tools like wordtracker or Trellian is excellent for understanding the "voice of the customer" - words that prospects use to describe the product or service that you offer- as long as the phrases are well established. But what about keyword phrases that are evolving or being coined today? By the time an SEO expert has found them, he is already behind in the race to get search engine position.

That is where tools like Hittail and Blogpulse come in.

I've written about Hittail a couple of times, but if you haven't downloaded it, you can get it here free: www.hittail.com.

Blogpulse is a tool from Neilsen Buzzmetrics. You can check it out at www.blogpulse.com.

Hittail give you a realtime stream of keywords, as well as the ability to easily repeat the search that brought your visitor. It allows you to identify emerging keyword combinations quickly.

What it doesn't do is help to expand your keyword list to related terms.

If the phrase is very new, the keyword research tools won't help you here.

So how can you identify related keywords to the longtail phrases Hittail shows you from your site traffic?

For this I have recently started to use Blogpulse. Results are fresh. timely. and framed in the language of the people who are most interested...niche bloggers and the site visitors who post their comments. I have to comb through the results, looking for useful terms and phrases. It is not neatly packaged like a keyword tool, and volumes are anyone's guess. But the wording in use by the bloggers and commenters is a good starting place for building out a list.

The site also displays helpful charts showing incidences of the phrase over time.

I am on the hunt for a more immediate keyword research tool. Can anyone suggest one for me?

I'm Trying out Hittail

A couple of days ago I installed the the Hittail real-time search hits application on this blog. You can register and get the code for your own site at http://www.hittail.com. I am running the freebie version of the application, for now.

I learned about Hittail on the Web Analytics Association site blog. If you are not a member, and you are interested in Web Analytics, I suggest you join the Association.

• the community is very helpful and supportive
• they organize educational events
• the forums are very active, and provide a good mix of practical information along with insights on where the industry is heading

Anyways, I installed Hittail here on this blog, and then, when everything seemed to go well, I also installed it via the wordpress plugin on http://www.moneyweekes.com. So far...no data on that site. Now, I am not panicking yet, because it took a couple of days for the stats to register for this blog. But when they appeared, all the historical data was there.

As a surprise bonus, in addition to reporting keyword traffic, the system informed me that my blog had been stumbled (I had been meaning to submit this blog to stumbleupon, but I'm delighted that someone else found the site and gave me the thumbs up), and received linkedin visits and traffic from the WAA today.

While all of those are great to know, I'm not sure how they will play in to the software's stated objective to help me identify which longtail keywords I should be optimizing for.

Ambar Shrivastava from Hittail described the primary benefit as follows:

"The idea is to provide actionable data that helps webmasters and bloggers better connect with their existing readers as well as attract new readers interested in similar topics to what you already have on your website. This differs from other analytics tools that mainly describe what is happening on your site with little information on how to improve it."

I ran into a couple of snags along the process of installing (what can I say, I'm tired...it's easy, but I was firing on half cylinders). And I can tell you that the team over at Hitbox fairly jumped at the chance to help me out. They get double thumbs up for customer service.

I have shared the application around the office, so I'll have more to report back shortly, I expect. We are all anticipating good things. I work for a publisher, so our sites are very original-content rich, which seems like a good fit for Hittail. However, the moneyweekes.com site is i Spanish. Not sure how the application will handle other languages.

One of our programmers looked unimpressed and muttered "um, you know you can get that data from your log files, right?"... Yeah, I know. But Hittail does digest the information for me and highlight key points...and theoretically it provides optimization suggestions based on my words. I say theoretically, because my search volumes don't merit any suggestions as yet. . And most exciting of all....it does it in almost realtime. So I can start getting a sense of when people are visiting the sites...what is the best time of day to publish my newsletter? How often should I be posting here? I read on their website that I should have about 100 pages minimum.

So if you found me through a searchengine (or maybe even if you didn't) chances are tomorrow I'll be thinking about your keyword search, and how I might better address the issues you seem to be searching for online.

Anyone else out there installed the Hittail code on their site? How is it working for you?