It’s easy. Setup a blog about your favorite hobby. Write a couple of pages and watch thousands of visitors start coming to your site.

Wrong! Starting a blog is all about consistently writing quality content that your (potential) audience is interested in and, more importantly, searching for! But how do you know about what users are searching for, and what you should write?

You could look at your log reports (Google Analytics offers a great free tool) and see the most popular Search Engine keywords or keyword phrases resulting in hits to your site. Google’s Webmaster Tools also offer more detailed information on the phrases people use to find your site, but it’s limited to Google’s search engine.

But there is also an online SEO Software tool – HitTail - which is a must have for creating quality content around subjects your readers are looking for. Even better, it helps generate ideas for new posts when you hit the inevitable writers block on your blog.

How does HitTail work? As their founder states, “HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts — to help you grow your natural search traffic.” To start getting information from the service, you place a small piece of tracking code on your website. The code works quietly on the background and records search hits and keyword information. The software then analyzes these phrases to give you suggested topics based on the underperforming keywords that you can use to improve your results in search engines. By using the suggestions in new website content, blog posts, or PPC campaigns, you can improve your search results to attract qualified visitors to your site. By using Google’s free Keyword Tool, you can also prioritize these suggestions by seeing which topics may have the potential to generate the most traffic.

When I first signed up in 2007, HitTail had both a free and paid service (ranging from $9.99/m to $99.99/m). and the free service was plenty for most bloggers starting out or for those bloggers who have hit a creative wall or traffic plateau. While they no longer offer this free account, their starter “Plus” account is only $9.99 per month, and comes with a free 60-day trial. This trial is a great offer for bloggers or small business sites who are currently already receiving some level of Search Engine Traffic, but are working to increase their number of visitors.

I have personally used HitTail while writing content for one of my business sites that grew the percentage of our “Long-tail” hits from 20% of our overall Search Engine traffic to over 75% over a 5-month period.

If you are serious about building your audience(s) for your blog or small business website, I believe HitTail is a must-have tool in your SEO arsenal.