As many of you know, I’ve been go after search term make money online and make money on the internet. So far, I’ve been very successful at it, ranking number two for make money online and number one for make money on the Internet. As nice as that is, it’s interesting to note that my top ten keywords accounts for just 6% of my search traffic. The other 94% comes from long tail keywords.
What Are Long Tail Keywords
An example of a normal keyword would be, “make money online.” An example of a long tail keyword would be, “How do I make money using Kontera?” The long tail is an economic concept that says the collective demand for less-popular items can exceed all the most popular added together. In other words, most of your search traffic comes from strange search queries that you may have never thought of. For example, quite a few people have found this site while Googling for “cute teens with tight pants.â€
Long tail keywords are more targeted because the searcher is entering more information. My chances of signing a search engine user to Kontera is a lot higher if he came from a search on how to make money with Kontera than if he came from a search of make money online. How do we know which long tail keywords to target?
Using HitTail To Hit The Long Tail Keywords
For the past few days, I’ve been testing a really neat service call HitTail. In a nutshell, HitTail helps increase your site’s search engine traffic by telling you what long tail keywords to use in your articles. A small piece of code is installed on your site to track search engine traffic and the keywords used to find you. HitTail then uses sophisticated algorithms to pull out underperforming terms as suggestions.
Now all you have to do write a post using the suggested keywords and watch your search ranking improve for that term. Some of the search terms HitTail comes up with are pretty far out. While I don’t see a problem using “making quick money” or ‘rubiks cube methods” in a post, I have to wonder how I can get “21st birthday wise words” or “0 credit card banks” in a post (other than what I just did now). In addition to recommending long tail keywords to use in your articles, HitTail shows all the search terms that search engine users used to find your site. I’m not sure I want to know the person who found my blog with the term “Jon showers.”
HitTail is free for up to 100,000 website visits per month. If you do more than 100,000, you have to pay $49.95 per month. If you sign up for HitTail Plus between now and April 30th, 2007, you get half off the regular rate for as long as you remain a HitTail customer.
I’ve been using the service for only a few days and I can see potential. I’ll post another update after a month or so to show what effect HitTail has on my search traffic.