So, to bring that original search hit in, we all know we need to optimize our search pages naturally, and some of the more advanced folks have figured out how to mine their log files to get the best keywords to start with. Well, we've just made that process into a free website that's in beta. If you're interested, you can find the link in my profile. It bascially plays off the fact that your own site contains most of the competitive intelligence required to guide you on what to do next. But analytics packages don't find those trends and explicitly tell you what to do next. This does. Feel free to give it a try.
you need thousands of enteries over couple of months time period in the log file to really get going. If you have couple of hundred visitors or you pick few days log, you might be getting skewed results, as there might be spikes for searches in certain keywords due to some news. Just my two cents. Zafar
Results do vary. Already active sites tend to have new long tail writing suggestions pour in at a rapid rate. Brand new sites do take months to build. It's worth it either way. What is freedom from having to pay for Ad Words yourself worth?
You can have a good list of suggestions to play with in a short time. For my site, I got a decent list within a week, and by 10 days, I already saw a pattern of things I can focus on. And welcome to DP Mike
Awstats is good for this. If more than one person finds one of my pages through the same term in a month and I don't rank high for it and it's not in any of my titles or in my 'targetted key phrase list' (excel file I use), I will create a page for it. Just think how many more people would find you through that phrase if you were ranked near the top instead of on page 2-3 etc. Pete
Awstats is great. The "more than one person finds one of my pages through the same term in a month" rule is a nice approach. We've developed algorithms that zero in on where your best gains are to be made with the least effort. It also has the advantage that non-technical people can use it. There's no deciphering reports. There's no extraneous data. Just a constant flow of suggested writing topics to grow your long tail.
Oh yes, and thanks for the welcome and the replies. I've had an SEO-centric mindset for many years, and am just discovering sites like DP. Looks like some familiar faces from my active JimWorld days.
Mike, I don't know if you are watching this thread or not... Anyway I have been giving your sysem a try. So far I think it is interesting and worth some time to evaluate. I signed up with a site that gets very little traffic (since I was a tad trepid). Now that I see its potential I wish I had used a different domain. With so little traffic it is hard to get much out of it... There seems like no way to add another domain (which would be a great feature!). Shall I just make a new account for each domain?
So, I'm not watching these threads daily, but I am making the rounds! Anyway, yes, register a new username for each domain, but use the same email address. We have an email-login coming soon that will let you step through all your sites! Also, we just put out this demo for people who are not converted to HitTailing yet... http://www.hittail.com/demo/ (live links & signatures are not available to me yet, so just copy & paste.)
1. I did some "test searches" for my pages. They did NOT show up in the hittail results. Why not? What determines whether or not a search is "counted'? 2. I cannot get into the hittail forum. I am asked for my user/pass AGAIN, and it does NOT work. Is it necessary to register a SEPARATE user/pass, to get into the forum? I am commenting HERE, because I cannot comment THERE. 3. HOW MANY sites may hittail be applied to? I added the hittail code to a page from another site, yet I see no results. Why not? Is just one site allowed? <edit>"register a new username for each domain, but use the same email address" - sorry, I missed this. This needs to be in the FAQs.</edit> 4. Targeting a million unique searches of 1 each, will make a page look like the king of keyword-stuffing pages. This is not useful. The usefullness seems to be at the "knee" of the curve, because of this. 5. My keyword suggestions are either OBVIOUS, and already targeted, or they are BIZARRE (too unique), and off the mark. I did, however, get some good hints near the knee of the curve, by lengthy staring - the same technique I use with awstats - stare at them for a long time. 6. The site I am testing has great subject variety, so I can associate hits with the page they occurred on. How does an homogenous site on one subject, associate hits with the pages they occurred on? 7. Breaking out the results by Search Engine is EXCELLENT! This provides great additional insight, such as, "What the freak is wrong with Yahoo", and "Why is MSN so clueless?" Google superiority is apparent here, as well. Thank you.
Well, now I have used - 1. 3 different unique search terms, 2. on each of G, M, and Y, 3. from another computer down the road, all of which brought up my site, 4. which I clicked on, just to generate a little hittail data. Nada. Zilch. Nuttin. Until I find a good explanation for this, I'm done with hittail for now. I'm not template driven - it's a he|| of a lot of work putting up the code. Why bother, if it doesn't work (hits don't get counted)?
How about letting us take a look for you? With a quick glance at your site, I'm sure we could clear it up. If you're one of the participants on the forums or in communication with us by email, I think we would have made that offer. In some cases, it's the location of the code. In others, it's "encoding" getting in through copying and pasting into the Design View of FrontPage. And in some very obscure conditions, it's a JavaScript error from somewhere else that keeps our code from running. We can usually tell at a glance. Our email address is hittail at connors dot com.
OK. I'm done with hittail. Now I must spend hours removing the code. I am not template driven. Each page is custom. Why am I done? Endlessly "loading data" - it takes forever - can't even stop it and "logout". As I stated before, there are 2 types of suggestions - 1- Those I am already using, and 2- those I would never use. My best hittail is awstats - it's always there - right now. 1- It's fast, it's clean, it's easily decipherable. 2- It doesn't "miss" anything (such as, my own queries). 3- I don't have to manually place code on every page. 4- It doesn't make hair-brained suggestions, suggesting any and every obscure search term entered. 5- It basically provides the same data as hittail, but in a much easier to read format. I'm sure that others may find hittail useful. But to me, what started out as a fun toy, turned out to be a massive time sink, with no benefit, other than the breakout by search engine. But then, I already know about that. Google makes sense (is methodical), M is weird, and Y is unfathomable. The really cool DP Keyword Tracker has proven this to me, over many months. It's about time. It's always about time. I don't want to spend it here. Who cares about the last 5% of obscure hits. Not me. Not anymore. This level of "micro-inspection" is simply not productive. My time is better spent looking at "big things", not little tiny things.
I respect Surf Dude, as I respect everyone on the Internet. And people who have the capacity to run AwStats and mine it for keyword data are in a completely different class than most Internet marketers. For everyone else, we humbly offer HitTail. And even for Surf Dude, we offered free support while in beta. Anyway, now we're out of beta, and we're letting the thousands of folks who do find it useful, and their secret weapon in building traffic (just Google on it to see), we're giving a chance to lock-in some low introductory pricing forever. But no hard feelings. Filtering out the disingenuous clicks that come from competitors and webmaster benchmarking, in search of the truest "writing suggestions" isn't for everyone. Neither is watching those search hits as they occur, nor eliminating the incredible time-sink of longtail keyword research that drove us to write the application and offer it for free in the first place.
What if hittail supported uploading our old web server log files? And to surf dude about having to reload: there's a firefox extension to solve that: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/115 Of course, Opera had this feature builtin long before mozilla/firefox.