I just joined HitTail the other day. My understanding is that HitTail will give you suggestions on topics to write articles about within your blog that will supposedly get you immediate top positioning within the SERPs.

Well, I’m convinced that it will help but not convinced that they have something unique. In fact, the data they are showing you is in fact data that you already have if you have your analytics setup properly.

Now I’ve only been using this for two days now so please take my word for a grain of salt. I may not have seen what HitTail really does yet. I just telling you how I’m interpreting it.

First, HitTail hands you code, just like Google Analytics codes to embed within your site. This code simply sends the same data to HitTail that Google Analytics receives. If you pay attention to your Google Analytics, you can see what keywords people are using to find you. Some of the these keyword phrases are considered "long-tail" because they are more than 3 words.

Seeing the HitTail interface, when I click on the "Suggestions" Tab I don’t see any suggestions. Yet, when I look at the keywords tab I see the keywords that people are already using to find me. It has a feature to push these words into your "suggestions" and "to-do" list. If this is all there is to it, HitTail is worthless. At least to those who look at their analytics.

Simply writing an article and posting it in your blog with a long tailed keyword phrase in which people are already finding you with, well yes, will improve your ranking for that phrase. No surprise there.

I’m hoping to see actual suggestions derived from HitTail other than words that I push into the suggestions area but I haven’t yet. Please remember that I’ve only been using for a couple of days and may have not received suggestions yet… but again, if the actual suggestions are those that I have to push into it from a keyword list derived from traffic I’m already getting. Whats the point in subscribing? One, can just look at the analytics keyword references and choose long tailed phrases to entitle their articles with.

HitTail derived Suggestions, I hope to see… If they do give you actual suggestions, I can’t wait to see them!

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I’d like to make an addition to this post. Though I am still waiting on suggestions from HitTail, Mike has cleared up the questions referenced in this post. He putting together an FAQ here soon according to the latest post in his blog, if the latest post are top of the page being the latest here http://www.hittail.com/blog/2007/08/seo-faq.html . Mike thanks again for fielding our questions!