Recently, I just released the Cheat sheets for Rob Walling’s Book „Start Small, Stay Small“. He is involved in a company called Hittail (Hittail.com).

Hittail reads out what people searched for on the web when they come to your site and determines „promising“ search terms.

They suggest you write an article containing those suggested keywords (or you can order hittail to find a writer for you) which should ultimately let you rank #1 on google for those terms. So, I decided to give Hittail a try and singed up for a 21-day trial.

After you signed up, you will be given a code snippet to put on on your site. Since I use wordpress, they already offer a plugin for this (see http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-keyword-suggestions/) where you just have to fill in your account ID to get going. Sleek and easy.

After some hours, suggestions from hittail started to drip in via mail. For my specific blog, the situation is a bit special. I write in English and German so the keyword for maknesium.de / maknesium.com are a mix of both languages. Very neat one can do this with hittail and I’m pretty sure, this works with other languages as well.

So my first suggestions where all contrating around an article I had originally published in October 2011. It contains a bulleted list (another cheat sheet) for things to check of you plan to buy a used / second hand Mac. The article exsits in German and in English but the German one if far more popular. In October 2011 I had just bought a used iMac myself and figured I’d like to share my personal checklist with the world. Others should be able to save some time and just get going looking out for used Macs.

I verified if hittail was onto something good and looked where I actually ranked for the suggested keywords and who my competition was. So for example for the keyword „mac gebraucht“ (engl: used mac) I got the following:

Hm…. okay, this looks promising but I still had to find some good content to target to those keyword in order to climb up the ranking. After two weeks or so of just collecting keyword information, I decided to write another article about where to look for used macs online and offline. What risks are involed and where can you get the best prices. The article I wrote is in German and can be found here. Right at the beginning, it lists all the keywords suggested by Hittail to write an article for. I hope to reach all those keywords with just the same article to kill several birds with just one stone. We will see how this works out. :)

So right now, I’ll just wait a bit and see if the traffic frome those keyword rises, drops or doesn’t change at all. I’m planning to write a follow up post in several days to let you know what Hittail could do for me. Stay tuned!