HitTail is a new service I just got a beta testing invite for. Like many new services you add a little piece of javascript code to your pages and it will take your visitor data and hopefully make it useful.
Where HitTail is different from the rest is that it doesn’t promise you the world in beautiful graphed statistics - it simply looks at the visitors coming from search engines. Where most statistics packages tell you what most people type in Google and Yahoo to find you this service focusses on the long tail to tell you where some people are coming from - areas you can most likely improve.
The long tail is a term used to describe the long line or tail which you can see in yellow in the picture. Since we are speaking about search engine results here imagine you have a surf life saving club. Most of the search engine traffic might come from a search like “torquay slsc” so this would be the blue area in the chart. The yellow area, the long tail, is the results that might only get a couple of hits a day but have potential for more. Examples here might be “torquay surfing” or “surf life saving training”. With surf life saving training we may have hit a goldmine, we are ranked 12th (today anyway) for the term and we haven’t done any optimization on it.
Now we can try a number of techniques that I won’t go into today to get a higher ranking and therefore more free traffic to our pages. As we saw the other day in The Places Google Sends It’s Traffic it really does make a difference to the traffic you get from search engines if you are higher in the results.
Wikipedia has a good article if you would like to find out more about the long tail. I will go into some different methods of improving your ranking in the future, or you can get in contact with me if you want to know more today.