5 Favorite Features of Traffic Travis

Whether you have a large corporate site or a personal blog, you want people to find you. Usually they find you through search engines like Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Statistics show that websites that show up on the first page of click results get the most clicks. In fact, 62% of all clicks in search results are for the top three organic results. Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be an important task for anyone who wishes to be found. As a website owner, you can hire consultants or do it yourself. Using an SEO tool like Traffic Travis can make the job of a do-it-yourself-er much easier. Here are my favorite features of Traffic Travis:

Keyword Ranking

Traffic Travis displays the rankings of your keywords in the dashboard for all of the search engines you have selected. Besides displaying the number of pages that are indexed, Traffic Travis also displays how many pages are in the top 5 and top 10. Besides each of these is an indicator that shows whether this number is up, down or stayed the same from the previous site check.

The dashboard also displays the top five ranked keywords and their placement in the rankings.

Page Warnings

Traffic Travis examines each page for items related to SEO. For example, it checks to make sure your content has at least 100 words, that you have used an H1 tag and that it is different from your page title and under 8 words, the length of your title tag and meta description. The “My Site” tab displays a listing of the pages in your site with a number in the “Page Warnings” column. When you click on the number, Traffic Travis displays a detailed list of the items that either passed the test (indicated with a green checkmark) or failed (indicated with a red “X”). A description of why the item passed or failed is also provided so you can fix them (or feel good about the things you did right).

Keyword Research

Besides reporting on current site statistics, Traffic Travis also helps you discover keywords to improve your existing site or create new ones. You can enter one or more keywords or keyword phrases and return from 5o to 2000 results. Advanced settings let you select whether to return broad, exact or phrase matches and the country or language. After Traffic Travis has fetched the results, each keyword suggestion displays the total global searches, the searches for the country specified in advanced or the United States, by default, the pay per click competition and the average cost per click. The table also shows SERPs—the total number of results returned by the search engine for that search term.

Ranking History

I’m a visual person and love the graphs that Traffic Travis produces based upon keyword rankings. You can compare how a keyword has performed over time in one or more search engines or how one or more keyword phrases has performed in a single search engine over time.

SEO Competition

For each keyword you research, Traffic Travis suggest the difficulty it would be to rank #1 for that search term. It shows the average page rank and median page rank for the top ten search results for this keyword. In addition, Traffic Travis displays the average and median number of backlinks for the top ten search results pages versus entire sites and the number of SERPs. Each keyword has an associated report that displays the URL of the top ten search results, its pagerank, Page Authority (from SEOMOZ), backlinks for page, backlinks for site, and the number of backlinks from trusted domains. The part to focus on, however, whether the site is listed in DMOZ and whether the author of the page has used the keyword in the title, description and in an H1 tag. If the author has neglected any one or more of these, here is your chance to move up in the search rankings. Use these keywords in these missing areas in addition to good content containing the keyword phrase, and you just might displace one of the top ten.

Traffic Travis has a lot to offer the do-it-yourself SEO optimizer. I highly recommend that you add this software application to your toolbox. There are two versions available. The free version allows you to analyze five sites with a limited amount of keywords and results. For unlimited functionality, the Pro version is available for a yearly subscription.