Suzanne Falter-Barns likes HitTail and so does John Gartner and both persons don’t have anything to gain by promoting HitTail since it’s free. 

Suzanne writes:

"I have to say that watching HitTail’s a bit addictive, because results show in real time and it’s tempting to see what’s leading people to your site.  I’ve been using HitTail for a couple of weeks now and think the results are simply incredible.  Oh…and it’s free in beta."

In fact, I’ve met with Mike Levin, the creator of HitTail, a couple of times and he’s shown me some really interesting features of HitTail (some that you can see now and others that are under development).

According to MarketingShift:

"HitTail is a free (for now) analytics tool that tracks the words that searchers are using to find your blog or website and suggests less popular keywords.

HitTail has been getting good reviews as an addictive method of tracking your readership. By putting some code on your pages, you can track reader behavior in real time, and reshape your content accordingly.

Rather than paying through the nose for keyword buys, optimizing your site for natural search can be a more effective (if slightly more time consuming alternative). It will be interesting to see how HitTail author Connors Communications prices this tool once it leaves beta stage. "

I gave Mike some suggestions of what I’d like to see HitTail do in the future - hopefully, we will see some of those ideas materialize in the HitTail product, which I’m told, will always remain free, unless your site is super trafficked, in which case, you can probably afford to pay whatever HitTail costs.

Too bad they just don’t rename HitTail to LongTail - since the basis of HitTail is targeting the Long Tail of Search Engine queries that people are looking for on your site but where you don’t have content to match the query.   HitTail makes it easy for you to know what to create content for.

Now, any more ideas about HitTail - I’ll tell Mike Levin directly - but they come to me from time to time.