I found a great site recently... forgive me if you already knew of it's existence.  I was absolutely thrilled when I found it.  There are many services out there that can assist you with finding niche keywords.  The purpose in finding niche keywords is to weed out the competition from the more popular keywords, and rank high for very specific targeted keywords because of lack of competition.  For example: you may commonly target your website for the keyword: Dallas real estate.  Well, you may discover that your site ranks very poorly for this keyword because of the extreme amount of competition.  But you have found that you rank very well for the keyword: "Dallas single family real estate listings".  This is because there is less competition, and since it is a very specific keyword, you can target it, and do very well.  You may not get as much traffic from that particular keyword, but there was alot less work involved.

Hittail.com was born from the theory that the majority of websites get most of their traffic from niche keywords, not from high traffic popular keywords like: "Dallas real estate".

So, what Hittail does is take all of the keywords that people used to find your site, and catalogues them.  It takes your top ten keywords and classifies them as your most popular.  Then, it takes all of the other keywords and creates a long "tail".  It then proceeds to show you that usually over 50% of your search engine traffic comes from those niche keywords... not your top ten. 

In the case of our website, only 31.8% of our Search Engine traffic came from the top 10 keywords.  The niche keywords (search terms used 3 times or less, in a week long period), made up 68.2% of our Search Engine traffic.  We had over 220 unique keywords in our tail.  Some of them were just downright strange like: "buy a pew in Oregon", "false", "Fort Bragg army base", "need loan officers", "zip code real estate".  It's amazing what people search for!

Now... down to the amazing part...  Hittail comes up with suggestions based on your tail for words that you should be optimizing for.  I'm not completely sure how they do it.  I think they take a combination of competition factors, and number of searches in relation to your keywords in order to make the suggestions.  Lets just say I was very impressed with the first 10 suggestions it dished out.  I'd list them here, but they are so good I don't want anyone else optimizing for them!  ;-)

Once you get a few keyword suggestions from hittail, all you really need to do is start optimizing.  In most cases, this is probably as easy as writing a couple of blog posts with that keyword in the title and body.  Most of the suggestions have such little competition, it shouldn't be difficult to rank well.

I have spent alot of time with services like: word tracker and nichebot, and they definitely have their own strengths when looking for good keywords.  But for a free pre-packaged service that makes the suggestions for you without you having to waste time in the research...  this service is a no brainer.  It's a must for anyone serious about SEO.

Since I'm not the most articulate person out there, it may be better explained from this video

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Hittail.com: a Revolution in SEO

Written by: Justin Smith