Interestingly, this process seems to work well with just about any search engine that uses automated crawler / automated ranking criteria. Where it breaks down are the social network search or human-edited engines, like Eurekster Swicki, and to a lesser degree, Ask. But we think based on the massive popularity of Google, HitTailing has a lot of life in it. When the rules start to change, it will show in the HitTail data (the patterns change), and we’re in a pretty good position to evolve the HitTailing process as search itself evolves.

And to answer your question more directly, yes, HitTail encourages you to go pick those long tail fruits. But it points out to you which fruits are most ripe. And in the end, that’s what makes it into a writing suggestion tool instead of the enormous fray of analytics software that’s out there.

Today I posted a brief note on Googles overly-targeted semantic analysis, using the Christine Dolce Video caps thing as an example. Of course now I am mucking it up with anchor text and such, but the example stands: Google grabs words (out of context) and assigns semantic relevance based on overlapping sets from some corpus (plus other factors), and then constructs the snippet to match. The result is comical, but tragic. The traffic is highly targeted - but it’s the wrong target.

I’m now going to look at HitTail more closely. As an SEO I use many tools to locate and refine my own corpus of knowledge, from which I produce my own semantic analysis. I use that (via content) to influence the search engines to acknowledge the extremely high relevance of my site on the topic of my choosing :-) That process usually requires a good deal of work. The site has to be “convincing”. Honestly a good job will create a site that can influence an entire niche (semantically speaking). I have had fun and success this way for several years. But when Google acts this way, the process becomes trivial. Any spammer (or blogger) can rank with this “algorithm”. So it can’t last.

Bloggers think this is SEO because Google responds and sends them traffic. Does HitTail reinforce that by encouraging them to puruse the fruitful “long tail terms” with more related content? Sounds like it, but as I said I will look more closely. I haven’t studied it, by I believe when the Long Tail idea was first floated, Google was doing a much better job at producing relevant results. It just may be that the Long Tail book took too long to be published.

As far as whether HitTail is or isn’t SEO, that’s really just semantics. The term SEO refers to a particular industry now, and has certain connotations whether we like it or not. Getting involved with SEO implies that wild, wacky world that you yourself characterize. That doesn’t make many people comfortable, and limits the size of the potential market. The HitTail concept, whether it is SEO or not, simply lets people get into the natural search game who would otherwise waited. So, we’re really making what may be called a sub-set of SEO (using blogging software combined with supercharged writing topics) to achieve similar results.

And happily, due to the nature of the suggestions usually being uniquely keyed to your site, it’s not a generic traffic grab ala the days of AltaVista. It’s a traffic grab with what we hope is scalpel-like precision. You increase your slice of the pie with very tiny, incremental slivers that are right on-topic.

And on the PR front, yep, it’s a PR firm planting its flag in the SEO space. I admit it. But we’re also a programming group that can spin out entire alternative HTML websites using multiple XSL transforms. We program DLLs and Apache mod’s. We’ve write our own content management systems and proprietary tracking software. In other words, we’re not your father’s PR firm.

These days (since Jan ‘03 by my notice) you have to know what you want and go after it. I’m really tired of the bloggers talking about “more traffic” as if that mattered.

AltaVista wasn’t hit and miss at all ;-)