Traffic Travis - Don't Leave Home Without It

As an internet marketer, we are always looking for great tools to add to our toolbox, and Traffic Travis is one of these tools.  This nifty piece of software can help you perform keyword research, check your positions and backlinks on the search engines, analyze the your websites, and even snoop on your pay per click competitors.  All this in an easy to use and slick looking piece of software.  Best of all, it's completely free to use.  There is a Professional Edition of Trafic Travis, but the free version is completely useable and more than enough for most people.

The Traffic Travis keyword tools are pretty simple.  The one I use most is the Keyword Finder and it functions probably how you think it does.  Just type in a keyword, and it spits out a bunch of related keywords. In the results, you also get back a list of the daily search counts on the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN.  The search counts for keywords seem to be more accurate for more common keywords.  For example, when I do a search for PPC Coach, I am not getting any results back for the search counts.  You can import keywords from a file, and you can also export results to csv.

The Search Engine Tools are really useful, and if you do any SEO, you will be spending a lot of time here.  The first thing you do is create a project, and here you will enter in your site, the search engines you want to analyze, and the keywords.  You can also input in some competitor urls if you want to see to see how your site stacks up with others.  Once you click update, you will see where your site ranks in the SERPS for each keyword, for each search engine.  It also shows you the actual page on your site that ranks best for the keyword, and where the page ranked previously.  This allows you to determine if any SEO you have implemented is having any effect on your rankings.  

The Backlinks tool is pretty nice, although limited by the fact that it doesn't seem to return many results for your Google backlinks.  I don't think it is the fault of Traffic Travis though, as I think it is Google that is filtering its backlink results.  Anyway, when you fetch the backlinks for your site, you will see the page url that's linking to you, the anchor text used, the page's IP address, and its page and traffic rank.  What is really helpful though are the metrics at the bottom.  Here you can get an overall snapshot of your backlink strength, the total number of times each anchor text was used, and a lot more.

The PPC Analysis module is very handy for analyzing your competitor's successful PPC campaigns. Among other things, you can use it to find products to promote in your niche, figure out which keywords are profitable, and what ad copy people are using to get the highest click through rates. For a case-study on how to use this module, see my article Using Traffic Travis To Spy On PPC Campaigns.

As you may or may not know, search engines rank your sites using both on-page factors and off-page factors. While off-page factors like quality of links, number of links, and anchor text are most important, optimizing each page on your site for on-page-factors is essential as well.

Here is a list of four important on-page SEO factors:

• Include your keyword phrase in the title tags of your site.
• Add your keyword phrase to any H1 tags.
• Make sure you keyword phrase appears in the first 50 words of your content.
• Ensure that your page's keyword density for your keyword phrase is between 1-4%.

The Traffic Travis Page Analysis tool analyzes your page and gives you a letter grade based on these on-page factors. All you need to do is input a page url and a keyword phrase to analyze. Traffic Travis will then give you a ton of useful information about the page, including what optimizatons you can do to improve your page's seo rankings. Just follow the suggestions and you should see improvement in your site's ranking in no time.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the free version of Traffic Travis is good enough for most people and I highly recommend that you start with it first. However, for those interested, here is what you get with Traffic Travis Professional:

• 2000 keywords for Keyword Finder (vs 200)
• Unlimited Projects (vs 5)
• Competitor Analysis
• Print & Save Reports
• No Ads
• Product support

The full price for PRO is $99, but for me, I was able to upgrade my copy for free as a member of PPC Kahuna.

Traffic Travis is definitely one of those tools I would recommend to anyone interested in increasing the search rankings for their sites. It's completely free to use, so there is no reason not to take it for a spin.

Download Your Free Copy Of Traffic Travis