A week ago I was wondering through a list of ways to promote blogs and I ran across HitTail - a web site that does a free service to better track and keywords that your company should blog about. Their concept is that most search phrases are unique and so although knowing which search phrase is the most popular is useful, it won't allow you to get the whole picture of why people are coming to your site. I've just had this service up for a couple off days, but you can already see how 85% of my traffic is going to be hard to track little fragments of keywords.

• Top 10 keywords 14.2% of all your search traffic.
• Long Tail keywords are 85.8% of all your search traffic.
• Total unique keywords collected: 194

Now this in itself shouldn't be that surprising as you will often get different resuts if you search for "link suggested url submit", "link suggested submit url", "suggested link submit url", "suggested url submit link", or as Google suggests - Did you mean: link suggest url submit? and so it would make sense to identify each of these separately.

However, for the purposes of knowing why people are coming to your site it would be good to know that you have effectively targeted keywords for link and url as well as suggested and submit. Knowing that you have 9 results with combinations of those words will be more useful than knowing that any one set will has 3 clicks.

HitTail analyzes these keywords and makes suggestions about future blog postings that you can write to try to draw in more traffic. You can then move these suggestions over to a todo list that allows you to mark if you've written the article or not. Their first suggestion was - link suggested url submit - so thus the focus of this article.

HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, 
most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail 
of your natural search results. We present these 
terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can 
boost the natural search results of your site. 
It's that simple. 

To add some relevant information about this let me add in some links for where to submit your site to search engines (probably the top three are the only ones to worry about):

• Google submit
• MSN submit
• Yahoo submit - Note that you have to be signed in
• DMOZ directory
• Scrub the Web submit
• Splatsearch submit
• Entireweb submit
• Surf Gopher submit
• Navisso submit
• Alexa submit
• Subjex submit
• RSS Network submt
  

Frankly however, setting up Drupal with xmlsitemap module will allow you to automatically submit all of your urls in a nicely formated sitemap directly to Drupal, MSN, Ask & Yahoo whenever you add new content to your site. Articles now show up in Google searches just days after I write them.

This free service only required that I add some javascript to my site so that they could watch the incoming traffic. That's not so bad, but much of what this application is doing can probably be done by extending the search keywords module, by extending its features. I'm still not certain how the suggest feature works (or if it is providing something useful), but I will report back on that. Certainly having a summary of keywords used and their frequency could be beneficial.