I’ve been using HitTail every now and then when I’ve been thinking of a blog post to make, since I definitely don’t mind being favored by the search engines! Anyway, I think they offer a great service and they do have a ton of tools for their Basic (a nicer way to say free) Users.I plan on outlining the features I consider to be the most useful for an SEO.

My HitTail (LongTail Chart)

This is a great way to see which search terms bring in the most traffic and which search engine is supplying it. They only offer the statistics for upto 350 keywords and the search engines you can choose from are Google, Yahoo!, MSN or ‘Other’ which is mostly just Ask.com searches in my opinion.

Search Hits

If you just started ranking for a new term and are receiving hits from it, HitTail will let you know which search term it is! They record the latest hits (specifically the exact URL from the search engine that the user searched). It offers the exact time and date that you received the hit as well! I don’t know how much better this kind of reporting could be.

Keywords

I know I said that they already list the keywords, but they also offer an advanced solution for the advanced webmaster. This section will allow users to download their HitTail keywords an Excel Spreadsheet.

Suggestions

HitTail also analyzes the amount of hits you receive from search terms and composes a list of suggestions for topics that you can blog about, to get a better search ranking for that term. This is where I try to compose most of my ideas for a blog post from!

ToDo List

And finally, if you are a fast-paced blogger that just wants to take a look at your HitTail Suggestions, you could simply click on them to move to your ToDo List. It saves all your favorable suggestions, in case you’re looking for a blog post in the future.

Overall, I think HitTail is a necessity for any blogger that wants to receive SEO Benefits and free traffic from Search Engines. They do offer extended features for paying customers who upgrade to to HitTail Plus. Feel free to register here if you’re interested!

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