So I’ve been using Hit Tail (A free stats program) for
about 2 weeks now and I have some stats for you.

Hit Tail shows me long tail keyword phrases people are
using to find me. That’s not a huge deal as several
other stats programs do this as well in their own way.

What impresses me about my data coming back from Hit
Tail is that its entire focus is driven by long tail
phrase discovery for your site.

For instance, here are some stats for my site so far:

Top ten keywords are 19.4% of all your search traffic.
Long tail keywords are 80.6% of all your search
traffic. Hit Tail has also collected 143 keyword
phrases so far and makes recommendations of phrases,
based on the entire data set it collects from visits
and where and how they found me, that I should
capitalize on further.

Here is a novel idea for keyword research:

The only way to do proper keyword research for a niche
is to build a site and develop content for it. You can
get initial ideas from regular keyword tools about the
popularity of a topic, but developing a site and
watching real-time phrases being used to hit your site
develops the real keyword list you want to work from.
The keyword list I am developing through my content,
which gets picked up and ranked in the engines the way
it does because I publish on the Authority Site Center
system, is second to none and no one else in the world
has it.

No one can run a program to find out what’s on my list
because it is developed in-house.

Think about that for a moment.

1. You are developing a strong, real-life list of
phrases people actually use to find content in your
market.

2. No one else can ever have the same list if you are
writing original content on various topics in your
niche regularly.

3. While everyone else is using some generic tool like
Overture or Google phrase programs, you are developing
a unique list of phrases you know for a fact people are
really searching on, and that’s people who know exactly
what they want. (People in niches like mine who type in
one or two keywords to find something aren’t serious
enough to convert. They are just playing around and
wasting my bandwidth.)

4. While everyone else works like dogs to optimize for
those generic phrases they are rarely, if ever, going
to rank well for due to fierce competition, you are
simply providing content informed by all the other
searches in your market. Let the amateurs and Fortune
500s duke it out for the more useless phrases in your
market!

Stats tracking has come a long way. With a three-
pronged approach:

1) MyBlogLog.com, 2) HitTail.com, and 3) My log files
(yeah right, like I’m going to link you to THOSE!)

I am able to triangulate and pinpoint data in my market
that relatively few others in my market are able or
willing to find.

It makes my content better for you and it makes it
easier for you to find me because the engines find me
more relevant than millions of other sites and pages on
my search terms more often than not. When you know the
things I know about my visitors, the engines, and the
ways I can improve and create rankings out of thin air,
you will be a powerful publisher to watch out for in
your market for sure!

—About Jack Humphrey—
Jack Humphrey is the editor of the Friday Traffic
Report. He teaches blog marketing, social marketing,
and link building strategies. Stop by and subscribe to
his blog at
http://www.jackhumphrey.com