I thought I'd mention a service that has been around for a while and which I have found pretty useful.

Hittail.com

This service looks at the search terms that users have used to successfully find your site. Well, that's easy…
But this goes further.

Over time Hittail builds up a picture of the terms used so that you can instantly see which terms are the most commonly used.

But then it goes further…
Using some digital black magic the system analyses those terms and then makes recommendations as to which terms to target by writing some site content based upon those terms.

The concept is pretty simple. The insight is that there are some terms that are worth chasing and others that are not. Some terms you probably already rank well for, it is not worth doing more about these, even if you did not realise that you ranked well for them.
Other terms you may well not rank well for, but a single well written article may well make a very significant difference to your ranking – often I have found a single article can be enough to get a thinly traded word to front page SERPs. These are the ones to track down. Doing this job by hand is not really viable. Hittail makes it easy.

When they started out Hittail was designed to enable webhamsters to avoid using PPC to drive long tail traffic. If webhamsters target these long tail terms, often being the only person to do so then one can build sizeable traffic simply from these targeted items of content.

It used to be that Hittail was free. Sadly this is no longer the case but there is a 60 day trial option. I'd strongly suggest that it is worth a look. 60 days may well be long enough to build up a worthwhile picture for your website and if it is then it'll be worth continuing with.

I know that the recommendations from Hittail.com are worth following. The thing is that it directs one's work, so unless the recommendations are off-beam then it will save time – if you are using the idea of pulling traffic from organic search through low demand keywords.

In essence, this is one of those tools that, when looking at basic principals, does the right things right. This is why I recommend the thing. There is no mumbo jumbo, the concept is sound and it is hard to envisage that, unlike many tools out there, it would not work in general application

I was using the tool on my article directory to track how folks were reaching the site and had my eyes opened to the huge breadth of keywords being used and the surprising number of times that some odd terms were being used. This helped me to understand how it was that many of the crappy keyword stuffed articles were not being found and led to the insight that, in general, they were not affecting the quality of the site because keyword stuffing leads to a monotone effect wherein only one or two phrases are being 'broadcast' and very few people will respond. Better written articles hit many buttons through their better use of language. These better articles by broadcasting a 'tune' appealed to many more readers and thus picked up many more page views. Hittail really helped me to see this and made managing the site much easier.

One application that strikes me, upon reflection, is to use the tool to 'tune' sites built using content from blog networks such as Syndicate Kahuna and Article Marketing Automation. Imagine starting a site based upon a fairly general keyword, then using Hittail to see how folks are reaching the content and then feeding those terms into the blog network setup to filter content. One could build small sites tightly niched, with 'unique' content that people were searching for. I can see that, as long as matching content is available, that such sites might rapidly become authority sites within that micro-niche.

Hittail.com
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