HitTail – a useful statistics service
HitTail is a cool statistics service with a slight difference. They don’t track visitors once they arrive on your site, they only track the source of visitors that have arrived via a search engine, and then monitor what keywords the visitor searched for… Why is this beneficial? Well, this all relates to the Long Tail theory, where (in THIS instance) the least popular keywords actually make up most of your referrers.
Here’s an explanation I gave my wife on the Long Tail. Amazon.com, as we all know, sells a LOT of books. Obviously, there are the books like Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” which sell in the 1000′s. Lets say that in any given day they sell 100 copies. And, let’s say there are a few other books by popular authors like John Grisham and Frederick Forsyth (can you tell what books I read?).
Amazon also “stocks” books that are not so popular and only sell 1 copy a day.
The Long Tail theory roughly says that, even though these big seller books sell 1000′s a day, the sum of all those “1 copy a day” books totals a lot more than the popular books. And, I’ve seen a lot of mentions of there being an 80/20 rule, where the Long Tail consists of 80% of the total.
Ok, so now you’ve read my attempt at explaining the Long Tail theory, here’s how HitTail fits into all this. If you have a site that is “optimised” for a few major keywords, you might be getting a decent amount of traffic from them, but you probably also get visitors for terms or phrases you may mention somewhere on your site. You might be lucky to get this visitor because they’ve gone past the first 20 or 30 results on Google and thought your site seemed the most likely result they needed. HitTail has the ability to point out what those search terms are, so that you can then focus on writing an article or 2 about each of those terms. This might cause you to rank higher in Google for those terms, and therefore bring you more traffic.
I’ve just started using HitTail on one of my blogs, and here are some of the really interesting terms I’ve found that I’m receiving visitors for and HitTail is suggesting I write articles for:
“girl party ideas”
“stylish kitchen”
“velvet paint”
“home deco”
“bright pink bedroom ideas”
Believe it or not, it’s not a sex site. 
So, using these terms, I can try and gain more traffic. It might not be much, but if I double the number of visitors for these terms, I’m adding to the overall number of visitors to my site.
Very useful. So, I recommend that you go check them out at www.hittail.com. I also recommend that you read this blog post by the HitTail creator entitled “HitTail Vs. Digg – Which Works Better to Drive Traffic?“. It might be useful if you have a site that is just starting out and are keen to try HitTail.
By the way, I’d love it if you could post a few comments below on some of the strangest search terms that people have used to land on your site. I’m always up for a laugh. 
