More on HitTail and 103bees

Markus Merz added a good comment on my posts about hittail and 103bees.

Congratulation for listing the two leading inbound SE traffic tools. Just to add a compliment for 103bees.com, they are also very open minded when it comes to new features. Just shoot a message via contact form and you will receive a fast and nice reply. Oh, and of course 103bees.com also offers a blog :-)

Regarding HitTail and 103bees: I have also written two articles at performancing.com:

HowTo: Use HitTail for Copywriting Suggestions
103bees: Search Engine Traffic Analysis

Many thanks, Markus.

An Alternative to HitTail

Here’s another cool site that will help you analyze your search engine traffic more easily. You’ll remember I talked about HitTail, an SE tool, here recently.

Take a look at 103B’s which is a similar service that has gotted lots of attention from some Web VIPs .

By the way … interesting side note. I learned about this service from a company spokesperson who obviously found my post on Hit Tail and wrote me a personal email letting me know about his service. He even added a guest log in I could use to give the service a test run for free.

That’s how you make friends and influence people in the blogosphere, folks!

Q&A w/Lena: How can I get traffic to my blog? Keywords and tags … or is it more 'word of mouth'?

Lena's Reply: The first thing that you should know is that EVERYTHING is "word of mouth". It's one of the best forms of promotion you can get. So, it's not either or, you should be increasing "word of mouth AND...[insert whatever other strategy you'd like to do here].

The next thing you should know is blogs are automatically 'keyword optimized'. That means that whatever the subject of your latest blog posting, that's what gets indexed by the search engines. So, if you post to your blog about Brittney Spears' interview with Matt Lauer, then that's what gets indexed. Whatever term comes up most often in your post, is what gets indexed in the search engines.  Which is why it's a good idea to stay on topic when posting to your blog! If you are an executive coach, then don't blog about interior decor. Get me?

You can generate traffic to your blog any number of ways...you can start by posting to other people's blogs and making good use of track backs.  There are other ways as well...

We go over increasing traffic to your web site and blog in (you guessed it) the Technology Diet. See you there: http://www.TechnologyDiet.com

Q&A w/Lena: What is an SEO?

Lena's Reply: Well, there's no such thing as "an" SEO.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process - not a physical object. It's the process of optimizing your web site's content and code so that it is more palatable to search engine robots and therefore more likely (the operative words being 'more likely') to be indexed and added to search engine results.

However, since I am a part of Google's Developer's Forum, I know that Google is placing less and less emphasis on meta, title and description tags because the Internet "bad people" have been manipulating those code fields for their own benefit and all but a few small business owners have been left in the virtual dust.  Google is very big on fairness and equality so now they are placing their rankings determinations on other parts of your web site.

Want to know EXACTLY how to structure (or restructure) your web site to get a solid Google ranking? The answers are in the Technology Diet: http://www.TechnologyDiet.com

Search Engine Optimization Update

Along with all of the marketing consulting my biz is getting right now, I’ve signed on with a great search engine optimization service, accelerateonline.net. John Rooney, the primary contact, presented me with a targeted list of keywords of getknownnow.com and I was really interested to see what he came up with.

If you do key phrase searches using sites like wordtracker.com, you see something called a KEI index – this evaluates not only how many hits the word gets per day, but how many sites use it as a key phrase. That’s useful because you don’t want to get buried by an overcrowded key phrase in Yahoo and Google searches.

On the other hand, you don’t want to go so obscure, you find only phrases that get typed in 10 times per month.

John and his team did a lot of searching and returned to me a list of key phrases that were both very high KEI scores (one of them over 40!) … as well as quite a few on the list that had KEI scores around zero. Why the zero’s I asked?

Because their goal is to provide a balanced list of 25-30 phrases, some of which will be hot – lots of searches not many competitors – others of which will be more obscure (a few searches, no competitors or many searches, many competitors.)

Interesting theory! We’ll see how it works.

Now that I’ve approved their list, I’m waiting to find out how the key phrases will be applied to the site (they’ll do some, and I’ll add some in page copy.)