Is Hit tail any good

I've signed up for a trial of Hittail, I believed it was going to give me keyword suggestions so far all its given me is realtime stats.

Has anyone else used it?
Does it give search term and keyword suggestions?

I am considering canceling my subscriptions

 

I've been using their free version for the past couple weeks, and while it's interesting, I'm not sure exactly what to do with the suggestions it's making.

 

I have been using it for a few days

Coming up for search results and they haven't made any suggestions yet.

 

I have been using it for a few weeks and I think it is pretty cool. For the most part you can get that data from your awstats off of your server. It is cool that you can monitor it page by page and engine by engine. The way you would utilize the data from Hit Tail is once they have made a suggestion for a keyword is to do some of your own research using multiple keyword tools to see how many searches there are per month for the phrases that each page is found for. If there are enough searches to justify it, either add the phrase to your site or create a new page that is optimized and linked to from multiple internal site pages to see if you can get more targeted traffic. Hit Tail is not the Holy Grail. I am not sure I would use their keyword suggestions but do a cross reference with your own traffic stats and play with it. It is a fun tool though.

 

motoxxx's got it right, and it's the product creator saying that. We're not the holly grail, despite some of our users thinking so. That's why we priced it the way we did (fee / $99.95/yr ).

To address the "big" question, I could write a book on this. But to keep it short, here are the principles...

1. HitTail won't optimize your site. That's why we recommend blogging software, namely Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or SquareSpace. These are the four biggies that meet our criteria. HitTail works with everything else, like OSCommerce, FrontPage and CMS systems. Just not as well, for a variety of reasons that must be discussed separately because it's such a long discussion.

2. HitTail will tell you the best next writing topic to pick up traffic quickly, but only if your site has achieved a sort of "critical mass" that our data tells us happens with about 100 blog posts, and the regular rolling out of new content, even on top of that. We illustrate that point here.

3. Even after all this education and proven methodology, HitTail isn't for everyone. Some high volume sites get TOO MANY suggestions to be reasonably manageable. Other sites get too few suggestions, and will never take the plunge into blogging software as we recommend NOR will do an adequate SEO-job to compensate. Then there's a third category, where the SEO job has been so specific and focused that it is incapable of "seeding" suggestions (think blog index/archive pages where all posts run on one page).

So there you have it. Wish I could spell it out even clearer, but it takes a bit of a leap. And for people who aren't into the whole longtail thing, we never take offense when people cancel.

We would just love to count you as part of the HitTailing world, and probably recommend teaming up with someone for whom it is working to let some of that enthusiasm jump over to you.

 

Thanks Mike

So it might not work as well with Drupal then?

 

I enabled it couple weeks ago. Just checked one of its suggestions with google keyword tool and it is actually quite valuable. So I'm going to use it to optimize my web site.

I'm using free version of it and it is good enough for me.

 

The free version of Hittail is nice too, as long as it is free.

 

Here is an update on my Hit Tail experience:

I am finding out exactly how people are searching and finding my sites. I went back and found that I was missing approximately 50,000 more search queries per month by not sprinkling in some of the other longer tail searches phrases that were coming up on my Hit Tail results. I should also let you all know that I actually optimize all of my pages for the longer tail search phrases and usually just focus on one per page. The hit tail tracking really shows you exactly how people are finding your pages and how the search engines are using the latent symantic indexing on your website in some cases. The most valuable feature is going back to see exactly where your site came up in some one elses search queries, possibly on an engine that you ignore, and monitoring what it was that made that page come up in that result. Also it lets you know after you do a keyword research how many searches per month there are for the phrase in the longer tail and if you need to be focussing a bit more in another direction. VERY COOL!

This is a different sort of a keyword tool that shows you how people are searching for what you have and how the search engines are finding you. It doesn't tell you how many searches per month a phrase gets. You'll have to find that else where. But this can give you incredible insight to gaining more relevance.

I was already doing really well with my websites. This is going to help me ramp it up and track everything really nicely.

I think I will even look into the paid version to see if it will fit my needs. People, I am not affiliated with Hit Tail in any way but I kind of had an "AHA!" moment today and what this can show you about your current traffic can be very powerful. It is very cool!