Using Traffic Travis As A Web Agency Or Freelancer

Traffic Travis is not just useful for improving and tracking the performance of your own websites. You can also use it to provide services to clients as a freelancer or as part of your own web agency or services business. Even if you presently use Traffic Travis just for your own sites, pay attention to this newsletter, as you will learn how to earn yourself some extra income on the side just by using Traffic Travis to help others.

Today we are going to look at:

• The different services you might offer to clients, that can be automated with Traffic Travis.
• How to market your services.
• Monitoring rankings for clients.
• Creating keyword analysis reports.
• Adding logos and branding to the reports you create for clients.

What services can you offer using Traffic Travis?

There are a number of different services you could offer to people or businesses that can be made a lot easier and more efficient by using Traffic Travis.

These services include:

• Finding keyword ideas for clients and assessing the difficulty of ranking for them.
• Tracking the ranking performance of pages for particular keywords over time.
• Discovering new link building opportunities for your clients.
• Finding page warnings that could be holding back their website’s performance.
• Assessing the performance of their link building campaigns.
• Providing insight about competitor’s websites, including how well their sites are optimized for on page SEO, and where they are getting their backlinks from.

Note: You will have more ability to offer great service to your clients if you upgrade to the Professional version of Traffic Travis. It offers a number of benefits including the ability to create custom-branded reports, add large numbers of sites to the Dashboard, and get more detailed statistics.

Traffic Travis Professional will really help your efforts, as with Traffic Travis Free version you are limited to:

• A maximum of 5 projects
• No custom logos on your PDF reports
• A maximum of 100 keywords
• No more than 5 keywords per search in SEO Competition, Domain Research, and Keywork Research tools

Traffic Travis Pro has none of these limitations.

Creating reports & adding custom logos

One of the most useful features of Traffic Travis if you are offering services to clients is the ability to export reports as both PDF and CSV files (for use with spreadsheet tools like Microsoft Excel).

Imagine your client has requested that you find a set of keywords based around ‘Labrador training’.

Let’s see how easy it is to do some reasearch and then create a professional report. First you would open up Traffic Travis to the ‘Research’ – ‘Keywords’ panel, and then enter ‘Labrador training’ into the search box, just as in the example below.

See the row of ‘Data Options’ along the bottom? The ‘PDF’ and ‘CSV’ buttons allow you to export your results into reports for your (or your clients) use.

The PDF file will look like this:

A CSV file (opened in a spreadsheet program) looks like this:

You should ask your client which file type they would prefer (or just offer both).

Tip – Branding your reports

Another trick you can perform (with Traffic Travis Pro) to help get your name out there and build a brand profile is to attach a custom logo to your reports.

Find or create an image you want to use as a brand logo for your reports. A rectangular image around 190×80 in size gives the best results.

Go to ‘File’ – ‘Program Options’ and you’ll see the following screen.

Use the ‘Browse’ button to find your image and import it into Traffic Travis.

After you have imported your image and clicked ‘Save’, go back to the keyword research tool of Traffic Travis and generate a PDF report again (just as we did before).

Here is the end result:

Notice the new logo in the top right corner of the screen? That is just one of the perks of having Traffic Travis Pro.

Marketing your services

Knowing how to use Traffic Travis isn’t the only thing you need to know to be able to provide services to clients for a profit. You also need to know where to market your services.

One of the best places to start is a website called Fiverr.com

There are quite a few “interesting” jobs (also known as ‘gigs’) that people are willing to do for $5. However, you don’t have to have a humorous skill or talent to profit from Fiverr. You can use it to effectively market services that you perform with Traffic Travis. Whenever someone buys one of your gigs you will receive $4, and the other $1 is split between site owner fees and Paypal fees.

You could offer all sorts of services on Fiverr.com that you perform with Traffic Travis. A couple of easy ideas to start with are:

• Offering lists of 50 or 100 link opportunities based around the client’s site topic (for example if their site is about Bulldog training then put ‘bulldog training’ into the link finder tool of Traffic Travis, filter to their location if necessary, and then generate and export the report).
• Providing a report that analyzes the top 10 competitors for a particular keyword.

The key is to make sure you are able to perform the task quickly and efficiently. Because at the end of the day, on fiverr you are only earning $4 for your time. And although this might not seem like much money, if it only takes you ten minutes or less to generate a report and export it then that’s $24 per hour.

Other places you can market your Traffic Travis services include:

• Digitalpoint ‘Services for sale’ forum
• Elance
• Warrior Forum ‘Warriors for hire’

Tip – Building up a base of clients

Create a list of clients as you go along, and build up a relationship with them. This will allow you to spend less time competing with others for clients on sites like Fiverr and more time actually making money!

You could also generate business leads for higher priced serices by offering an initial $5 job, and then upselling clients to more detailed reports and analysis. For example, offer a basic list of keywords for $5. Next, offer to provide competition and backlink reports for say $15. Just remember to check the terms of service (TOS) for any freelancing website you use to make sure you are not breaking the rules.

Monitoring rankings for your clients

A slightly more in-depth service you can provide to clients through Traffic Travis is monitoring their rankings and website progress. Do you remember from part 5 of the newsletter series that you can import sites into the Traffic Travis Dashboard and then check how they are ranking for keywords over time, numbers of backlinks, and more?

You can use Traffic Travis to monitor your clients’ rankings over time. Just add their sites to the Dashboard like you would your own.

From the Dashboard you will be able to answer queries for your clients about things like:

• How many pages they have indexed in Google (or other search engines).
• The overall number of backlinks pointing to their website.
• Google PageRank and Alexa ranking.
• Where their five best backlinks come from.
• Their top 5 five ranked keywords.

Basically anything you would do for your own website in Traffic Travis can be done and exported for a client.

In the next newsletter we will be looking at using the Google Adsense and PPC tools in Traffic Travis to help you generate extremely targeted traffic to your website.

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Source : http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/07132

Part 6 – Advanced Link-Building

In an earlier newsletter we talked about using article marketing to get backlinks to your site. If you want to run a successful article marketing campaign that gives you lots of valuable backlinks, there are some important rules you should try to follow:

The 4 Rules Of Article Marketing

• Rule 1. Your content should be unique: When articles aren’t unique they don’t get picked up by the search engines. This is called the “duplicate content penalty”. Links inside a duplicate content article don’t hold the same benefit as a link inside a unique article.
• Rule 2. You should link to your site using your keywords: Remember that one of the most important factors for ranking highly for your search term is to have lots of backlinks using that search term. You should also spread your links throughout your article so that it looks natural to the search engines.
• Rule 3. You should get links from sites that are related to yours: These are called “on topic” links and they appear to hold more value than “off topic” links. For instance, a link to your dog training site from another pet care site is going to be much more valuable than a link from an automotive parts website.
• Rule 4. You should aim to get lots of links! Quality is important, but so is quantity! You want to make sure that you’re getting a decent number of backlinks for the amount of effort you put into producing the article. Spending an hour on an article only to get one or two backlinks is not an effective use of your time.

If you’ve tried a bit of article marketing through article directories, you know that it can be a good way of getting a brief surge in traffic to your site and some longer-lasting benefit from the backlinks, but traditional forms of article marketing fail in a few important ways.

The 3 Big Weaknesses Of Traditional Article Marketing:

• Weakness #1: Problems with duplicate content. Even if you create ten versions of your article for ten different article directories, you still only have ten chances to have your article appear in the search engines. Any time another site picks up the article, it’ll be seen as duplicate content.
• Weakness #2: You can usually only insert links into the article at the bottom, inside the “bio box”. This is not as good as having more natural looking links within the article itself.
• Weakness #3: Article directories are less useful than they used to be. Google in particular have come out with updates that devalue sites with a lot of duplicate and low-quality content. This includes many previously good article directories. So, although the better ones are still worthwhile, the value you get from having article in these directories is less than it once was.

Does That Mean Article Marketing Is Dead?

Not at all, it simply means you have to take a smarter approach. Fortunately there’s a tool that addresses all the problems of traditional article marketing, and kicks your article marketing efforts up to the next level.

Article Marketing Automation (AMAutomation.com) is an innovative solution from Daniel Turner and Marc Lindsay. We’ve recommended these guys for their stellar PLR content for quite a while now because they deliver great products. As well as finger-on-the-pulse market knowledge.

Put simply, AMA is an automated tool for generating alternative versions of your article, combined with a distributed network of blogs and websites (on various topics) that you can then submit your articles to. Your article appears on independently owned websites (related to your topic). Plus your links are actually in the body of the article.

Here’s a breakdown of what it does:

Article Marketing Automation – What it does

• “Spins” your articles to create thousands of unique versions. AMA contains a very powerful spinning tool that creates thousands of versions of your article in a fraction of the time it would take you to reword even one article manually. And it’s not some automated “thesaurus bot” that makes a garbled mess of your article… with AMA you write variations for each sentence, and then AMA multiplies them out into thousands of unique articles.

  It requires a little work at the start, but in general it shouldn’t take more than about half an hour per 300-word article. If you get 1000 articles from an hour’s work… that’s a pretty effective use of your time.
  

• Lets you link to your site in a natural way. Unlike article directories, AMA lets you link to your site within your article and use whatever anchor text you like. This means that you’re going to get a much bigger benefit from your links than if they were only in the “bio box”.
• Posts your article on relevant websites in the AMA network. AMA categorizes sites so you can easily find sites that are relevant to your own… (remember that links from sites relevant to your topic are much more valuable than unrelated sites). Another site that offers a similar type of ‘distributed network’ is Unique Article Wizard (also a worthwhile service, though slightly more expensive).

  AMA’s network of sites are independently owned, this allows AMA to grow much faster because they aren’t creating the sites themselves. The sites in the network are also “real” blogs, as opposed to blogs created just for the purpose of getting links. This means the content is much higher quality and they attract real readers, not just search engines.

  AMA started out with slightly over 2000 sites and has now grown into a large network numbering in the tens of thousands of websites. Covering almost every topic imaginable.
  

The key points are:

• Creates thousands of unique articles
• Posts your articles (with links) on relevant sites
• Those links point to you in a natural manner
• Has a huge number of sites you can post to
• Doesn’t use article directories
• Doesn’t attract duplicate content penalties

How Does Article Marketing Automation Stack Up?

How well does AMA live up to the 4 important requirements for effective article marketing? Let’s have a look.

• Rule 1: Your content must be unique: AMA has a tool that allows you to automatically “spin” out thousands of unique versions of the same article in a fraction of the time it would take you to reword one or two articles manually!
• Rule 2: Links to your site must look natural: AMA doesn’t restrict you to the bio box… you can pepper links around your article in a natural manner.
• Rule 3: Get links from related sites: AMA has a network of tens of thousands of independently owned sites on a huge range of topics. There are numerous sites for almost any topic you can think of.
• Rule 4: Get lots of links: As I just said, AMA have tens of thousands of blogs and websites on their network at the moment, and they’re aiming to eventually top out at 60,000. Even if just 1% of those sites were relevant to your site, you have the potential for 600 relevant backlinks (per article) right there!

If you really want to put your article marketing on steroids, this tool and service provided by Marc Lindsay and Daniel Turner is what you need. You’ll save time, effort, and be able to get a whole lot of (relevant) backlinks to your site for a small monthly subscription… it really is that easy. I suggest you check it out below.

Click Here to check out Aricle Marketing Automation for yourself

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Part 5 – How To Track Your Search Engine Rankings

It’s time to learn how to monitor your website rankings so you can keep track of how your efforts are paying off.

Traffic Travis is very good at providing you with accurate and accessible stats about your site. The trick is to monitor these statistics in order to see whether your site is improving in terms of rank or not.

Note: There is no way that using Traffic Travis can hurt the ranking of your website. If you see fluctuations in your ranking, or pages going up and down in the results, do not panic. As this is common, and a normal part of search engine marketing.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• Using the Traffic Travis Dashboard.
• What the best ‘metrics’ are to track your progress.
• Different ways you can monitor your site from within Traffic Travis.
• The importance of the long-term trend versus the short-term trend.

Using the Traffic Travis Dashboard

In Part 2 of the newsletter series, you learned how to import websites into the Traffic Travis Dashboard. This tab provides you with a clear overview of important website statistics, including:

• The Page Rank of your site.
• Alexa Traffic Rank (this is another way of ranking the importance of a website).
• How many pages you have indexed in the search engines you picked.
• Your highest ranked keywords are.
• How many backlinks you have, and whether that number is increasing or decreasing.
• How many unique domains are linking to your site.

What metrics should you focus on?

Metrics, in terms of SEO and website promotion, are simply different ‘things you can measure’ to tell how well your site is performing.

You can track a number of metrics, including:

• Number of visitors to your site.
• Conversion rates (how many people click or buy).
• Search engines rankings.
• Number of backlinks.

At this stage your main focus should be on your rankings for particular keywords. Your first priority should be getting pages ranked highly for the keywords you chose.

You can use Traffic Travis to monitor your rankings for any keywords. To do this you will have to load your site as an active project (remember that you can pick this option from the drop down box in the top right corner of the screen).

By pressing the ‘SEO’ button, then clicking ‘Rankings’, Traffic Travis will generate a list of rankings for your site for the keywords you chose when you made the project. Here is an example of this in action:

How do you add more keywords to track? Simple. Just head back to the Dashboard, and under the keywords section click the ‘Add More’ button. Add any keywords you would like to start tracking, and you will be able to check your ratings for them as well.

Here’s a little trick you can perform with Traffic Travis to get a visual display of how you are doing for a particular keyword.

From the ‘SEO’/ ‘Rankings’ section of Traffic Travis (this is where you got to see how your site is ranking for the keywords you selected) you can click on the ‘View/Compare’ option under ‘Ranking History’.

Select the search engines you want to chart your rankings for over time, as well as the keywords. In this example, let’s pick Google – United States as the search engine, and ‘dog problems’ as the keyword.

Press the OK button and you will get a graph of your ranking over time for the keywords you have picked.

This is a great way of using Traffic Travis to see how your rankings are improving over time.

Tip

You can use Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to help track which keywords are delivering the most traffic to your website.

Google Analytics requires you to install a small piece of code on any pages you want tracked, but it’s worth the effort for the detailed traffic and user statistics you can get. You will even get data on where in the world visitors are coming from, and how long they spend on any page.

Google Webmaster Tools will also help you to uncover the top search terms being used to reach your website. So if you are getting traffic from terms you hadn’t even thought about, you can see this and then spend some time targeting these terms specifically.

Keeping track of where your traffic is coming from is just as important as knowing what keywords you rank for in the search engines.

If you ever get stuck using these tools, Google provide very straightforward instructions for using these free services.

The importance of the long-term trend

Patience is a virtue. And nowhere is this more true than in the world of SEO and website promotion. While tracking your results, it is important that you focus on the long-term trend, and don’t get distracted by short-term fluctuations.

If you expect overnight results, you will be frustrated. Especially when trying to rank for competitive keywords. You should focus instead on how your site’s rankings are improving over the long-term. Expect results over weeks and months, rather than hours or days.

Your pages might gain or lose places in the search engines on a daily basis. One day you’re on Page 1 of Google, and the next day you are on Page 3 for no apparent reason. If you’re emotionally invested in these short-term fluctuations it’s a roller-coaster ride. That is why you should always be looking at the long-term trend rather than how you are ranking on a day to day basis.

This makes the Traffic Travis Rankings tool very useful. As we’ve seen above, it allows you to create accurate charts of your rankings over time, so you can see that long-term trend develop over time.

Here is an example of a chart generated by Traffic Travis that shows a long-term trend of improving ranking:

Note the dates along the bottom. This page didn’t increase its ranking overnight. I took a matter of weeks to improve.

Let’s take a moment to recap what we’ve covered so far:

• Import your website into Traffic Travis via the Dashboard to quickly check the important statistics.
• Use the Rankings tool under the SEO panel of Traffic Travis for more in-depth data.
• If you’re just starting with a new site, your search engine rankings should be your primary metric.
• Focus on the long-term trend.

Problems you might run into while monitoring your rankings

Here are some solutions to common problems you might experience while tracking your rankings:

• Pages are not ranking yet. It can take time for pages to get indexed by search engines and rank for keywords. Be patient, and focus on adding your content and building more links.
• The ‘Panda’ Effect. Early in 2011, Google implemented a number of changes to its search algorithm, which resulted in many websites plummeting in rank. As a rule, these changes were designed to weed out low quality sites. So if you focus on providing quality content and continue to build links you should have nothing to worry about.
• Rankings not updating in ‘real time’. For a number of reasons Traffic Travis does not update rankings for your websites in real time. But really, there should be no need to check your ranking constantly anyway, as we’ve already talked about focusing on the long term.

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Source: Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/0533

Part 4 – How To Build Links Using Traffic Travis

In the last newsletter you learned why links to your site are important. In this issue we cover exactly how to build those links.

It is important to note that Traffic Travis can’t actually go out and build links for you. But what it can do is find high-quality link opportunities for you.

Here’s what we cover in this issue:

• Getting links from blogs and blog commenting.
• Getting links from Forums.
• Directory submissions.
• Article Marketing.
• Discovering where your competitors get their links.
• Using Traffic Travis to find high quality link opportunities.

1. Getting links from blogs

Blogs are a fantastic source of links for your site. They are often frequently updated by their owners and can sometimes have quite high PageRank.

The easiest way to get links back to your site from blogs is to use what is known as ‘blog commenting’. At the bottom of most blog posts you will find a comment submission form, like the one pictured below:

You can leave a useful and insightful reply or question to the original blog post, and then add your website address in the ‘Website’ field. Some blogs will also allow you to add anchor text links in the body of the comment, although you will have to check other comments to see if this is possible. Remember. Don’t spam the comments. Not only is it not fair to the poor blog owner, most blogs moderate their comments and you won’t end up getting the link.

Another way you can get links from blogs is to guest post. This means that you writing an article or post for the blog owner, which he or she then posts on their blog. Inside your article you can add an anchor text link or two back to your website.

 

The easiest way to do this is to contact blog owners in your niche and offer them a free, quality article for their site- on the proviso that you get to include at least one link back to your site. WPMU have a great guide to guest posting on blogs to build links (and visitors) to your site.

2. Forum posting links

Forums, also known as discussion boards, are places online where people meet to discuss certain topics. If you are a regular Internet user you may already participate in an online forum. They are also great places to build backlinks to your site.

The most common method of building links to your site from forums is to add your website address to the ‘signature’ file of your profile. This way, whenever you comment on a discussion (also known as a thread) your link is posted automatically.

Here is an example of a typical forum signature, and signature editor:

You can also write a useful reply to a discussion thread and include your link at the end of your message. This is useful for forums that do not allow clickable links in the signature.

When forum posting and commenting for backlinks it is important that you:

• Follow the rules of the forum.
• Make a useful contribution to the discussion.
• Do not try to spam your links all over the forum without adding value first.

3. Directory submission for links

Submitting your website to a directory of sites is a time-tested and popular way of getting links. There are numerous directories online, both free and paid. When starting out it is better to focus on some of the bigger free directories. But don’t waste your time with the numerous spammy directories that really only act as ‘link farms’ full of links to poor quality sites.

Probably the highest quality free directory is the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ. It has a PageRank of 8, so if you can get your site listed in there it’s well worthwhile.

Read this guide to DMOZ directory submission to learn how to increase your chances of being accepted.

For a comprehensive list of free directories go here.

4. Article submission for links

Another great method of building links is to submit content to article directories. In exchange, you usually get to place a link or two in the resource box of your article. This comes at the bottom of the page and will allow readers to click through to your site.

For example, if you wrote an article about “German Shepherd training for beginners” then you could have a resource box that says something like Want to know more about how to train your German Shepherd? Visit my German Shepherd Training resources.. And remember, you want to try and make the anchor text of your link include the keyword you are trying to target.

There are literally hundreds of different article directories online, and it would take countless hours to submit to all of them. But really, you should focus on the big names listed below, beacuse they will give you the best results.

• Ezinearticles.com
• Goarticles.com
• Articlesbase.com
• Infobarrel.com

If you need more, read this comprehensive list of article directories (and Web 2.0 content sites that allow you to submit content) ordered by Google PageRank.

5. Using Traffic Travis to boost your link building

There are a few powerful ways you can use Traffic Travis to really ramp up your link building efforts.

First, you can use Traffic Travis to actually find link opportunities for keywords you want to rank for. Rather than having to manually trawl the Internet for possible links, you can save a lot of time using the ‘link finder’ feature of Traffic Travis.

Open the Link Finder by clicking the SEO tab of Traffic Travis. You should also open up the advanced settings. This will allow you to pick more potential link sources like blogs, forum guest posts, resources, and directories. As shown below:

If your keyword was ‘dog obedience’, like in the example above, Traffic Travis will return potential links that are suited to this keyword.

You can see the Traffic Travis link finder at work below. Notice that you can also learn the PageRank of potential links, how many other links are on that page, and the Page Authority of the page (the higher the page authority the better).

Another neat thing you can do with the Traffic Travis Link Finder tool is find government and educational (.gov & .edu) link opportunitites.

Simply open up the advanced settings of the Link Finder tool and check the Government Domains and Educational Domains boxes like below:

But perhaps THE most powerful link finding strategy you can use in conjunction with Traffic Travis is to actually find the backlinks your competitors are using.

Take the keyword you are trying to rank for, in the example below it’s ‘dog training problems’. Plug it into the Competition tool in the SEO tab of Traffic Travis and hit Analyze. After Traffic Travis has worked it’s magic click ‘View Details’.

You will then see a page that gives you the top 10 results for that keyword. You can see the PageRank, number of backlinks to both the page and site, and how many .edu or .gov links the page has. For now, we want to focus on the top competing result (the one that shows up first on Google).

What you do then is copy the URL of the number one site for that keyword into the ‘Backlinks’ finder of Traffic Travis (available under the SEO tab).

In the example below, you can see a list of the links that the top site for the keyword ‘dog training problems’ has.

To do as well (or better) than them, you will have a very good idea of the number of backlinks you will need, as well as a very good idea of where to get those links from.

To recap, we have covered some very powerful link building strategies in this issue. They were:

• Using blog commenting and guest posting to get links.
• Forum commenting for link building.
• Directory submission to generate links.
• Article directory submission for link building.
• Using Traffic Travis to help you find link opportunities, find high PR links, and discover the backlinks of your competition.

The importance of building links to your site cannot be understated. Follow this guide and use Traffic Travis and you will be well on your way to higher search engine rankings.

In the next newsletter, you’ll learn how to keep track of your results and make sure you are heading in the right direction.

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Source: Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/0493

Part 3 – Essential Off Page SEO Factors

In this issue of the Traffic Travis newsletter you’ll learn about the essential off page SEO factors that will contribute to how well your website ranks in the search engines. While on-page SEO is a one-time thing, off-page SEO deals almost exclusively with building links to your site and is what will get you the most results over time.

Here’s some of what we’ll cover:

• The number of inbound links to your site.
• The quality of the links to your site.
• The rate at which you should be buildling links.
• How to deal with anchor text.

But first…

Understanding Google PageRank

Before we get in too deep, it is important that you have an understanding of Google PageRank. Put simply, PageRank (PR) is a way that Google measures websites. It is based on a complex and evolving algorithm, but you don’t need to worry about that. What you need to know is that in general websites with higher PageRank are deemed more ‘important‘ than those with lower PageRank. Therefore, high PR websites often have a greater chance of outranking low PR sites in a Google search.

The easiest way to check the PageRank of your homepage is by using the Dashboard section of Traffic Travis.

Refer to the previous newsletter, for more on importing pages into Traffic Travis, as well as adding a website to the Dashboard.

In the ‘My Site’ section of Traffic Travis, you might notice that some of your pages have different PageRank, even though they are all on the same website.

This is normal, as seen in the example below.

You could say that Google PageRank is a reflection of how much a web page is trusted by Google.

Now let’s look at the essential factors that will help your off-page SEO and boost your PageRank:

1. Number of inbound links

By far the biggest force behind boosting your search engine ratings is the number of other web pages that have links pointing to your website. According to Wikipedia, a hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support for that page (you can read more about links and their effect on PageRank here) The more links you have pointing to your pages, the more ‘votes’ you have in the eyes of Google, and to a lesser extent the other search engines

Traffic Travis offers a few ways of seeing the number of links pointing to your own site. The most useful way of doing this is to use the Backlinks analysis tool that you can find under the SEO tab in Traffic Travis.

It is also important that majority of your links come from unique domains. So rather than having 100 links from Site A, you have a few from Site A, a few from Site B, Site C and so on.

To check your links, add your website or page to the ‘Pages to Analyze’ section, click ‘Analyze’, then when the results come up press the ‘Overview’ button. This will allow you to see the number of links your site has in total, as well as the number of different sites those links are coming from (as well as a few other handy stats).

In the example above you can see that the site as a whole has 223,279 backlinks in total, coming from 10,637 different domains. It also shows that there are 12 links to the site from .edu or .gov domains, but more on that later.

2. Anchor Text To Specific Pages

You want as many links to your web pages as possible to have anchor text that includes your keywords. This will help search engines correctly identify what your pages are about, and know which keywords they should be ranking for.

Let’s say you have a page called ‘Labrador training tips’. Ideally, you would want the links you get pointing back to this page to have anchor text like ‘best Labrador training tips’ rather than ‘click here’ or simply the URL of the page.

In the image below you can see an example of HTML with a good anchor text link to a page, and also an example of ‘bad’ anchor text link.

The top example would show as a ink to your site with the text ‘best Labrador training tips’. This is the type of link you should try to get whenever possible.

Unless you were trying to rank well for the phrase ‘click here’, you should avoid using it as anchor text as much as possible. Although having said that, you don’t always have control over the anchor text, and links like this are still valuable.

It’s also worthwhile to point out, that if ALL the links pointing to your site have the exact same anchor text, it begins to look very suspicious to search engines. So although you want most of your links to have anchor text with your keywords, varying up the anchor text, and including some ‘URL’ anchor text links is a good idea.

3. Quality of links

Not all links have the same value. Quality matters. Links from well-established sites, especially ones that are considered an authority in your niche, are much more valuable than links from more obscure sites.

The type of sites that are more valuable include:

• High PR websites.
• .edu or .gov websites.
• Authority sites in your niche. If you are unsure of what an authority site is, they are the bigger websites that tend to feature a lot in the search results for your chosen keywords (and related keywords).
• Sites that have been around for a long time.
• Sites that are relevant to your topic (a dog training website will be better off getting links from other sites about training dogs, rather sites about women’s fitness).

4. How fast you should be building links

Another important thing to take note of (alongside the number and quality of the links your site is receiving) is the rate at which your website is building links.

It’s good to see a green up arrow next to your backlinks count in the Dashboard section of Traffic Travis (as seen below) as this means you are building more links to your site.

But. You don’t want to build links unnaturally fast, or create a huge number in one hit and then stop. This can raise the suspicion of search engines and result in your site being penalized (especially if your site is brand new – older sites can get away with this to some extent).

A steady link building campaign will deliver the best results. Though as long as you aren’t using automated tools that promise to generate thousands of links all at once you don’t need to be too worried.

Let’s quickly recap what we’ve covered in this Newsletter:

• Google PageRank is an indicator of the ‘trust’ and ‘importance’ of a site.
• In general, the more sites that link to yours, the better.
• The anchor text of the links you build is important too, and you should build links to individual pages on your site based on the keywords you are targeting.
• Building links steadily over time is the best policy.

In the next newsletter we’ll get into the specifics of building links to your site.

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Source: Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/0372

 

Part 2: Optimizing Your Content With On-Page SEO

In this issue of the newsletter you’ll learn about optimizing your website content to help boost your search engine rankings and get more visitors.

This is what is known as on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

We cover:

• How to use title and image ‘alt‘ tags.
• Why writing a good meta description is important.
• How you should be optimizing your written content for SEO.
• Why internal linking is important.
• Why you should keep your content fresh and updated.

A few simple changes to your website can sometimes result in better rankings (almost overnight). Especially for lower-competition keywords. With correct on-page SEO, a little bit of effort can go a long way.

But first, make sure to set up Traffic Travis so you can keep track of your sites progress. Adding your site to the Traffic Travis Dashboard is easy. Use the ‘Create new project’ setting from the Active Project drop box on the top right corner of the screen.

Then simply add the details of your website like in the example below.

Remember to import the pages from your website to the ‘My Site’ portion of Traffic Travis as well, so you can check which pages are indexed, and if there are any SEO warnings. Use the ‘Import Pages’ function to do this. Or you can import an XML sitemap into Traffic Travis and have all your pages added automatically.

Tip

If Traffic Travis does not detect your site map properly, make sure you are using the standard sitemap.xml format.

Ok, so let’s get into optimizing your content (on-page SEO).

1. Title tags

You should be using your main keyword in the title tags of your web pages. You can also include your brand name to help boost your profile.

Title tags can be edited through the HTML editor of your web design software or blogging platform.

Be careful not to make your title tag longer than 70 characters, or it will be cut off in browser windows.

Here is an example of a title tag written in HTML

In this example you can see that ‘Dog Training Secrets’ is the brand name of the website, and ‘how to train your dog’ is the primary keyword being targeted.

2. Meta descriptions

The Meta description is a short block of text that is often displayed in search engine results underneath the title of the page. While a good Meta description isn’t going to magically send your page to number one, it will help increase your click-through rate by letting visitors know what your site is all about. This increased click-through can then have a secondary effect on your rankings.

The image above shows what a Meta description looks like in a Google search.

Your Meta description should contain the main keywords you are targeting, yet also be written in such a way that it compels the reader to visit your site. Around 155 characters is the best length for a good Meta description.

3. Tweaking your written content

Most web pages are made up of written content along with pictures, and video. Putting this content together the right way can help seriously boost your search engine rankings.

There are a few things to consider:

First, make sure you are using the keywords you want to target in your content. You can also use variations on the same keywords to create a more natural feel and help the flow of your writing. Use Traffic Travis to help you find keyword ideas that slot nicely into your page. Here is an example of this in action:

Lets say you are writing an article about ‘dog training collars’ – using the Traffic Travis keyword tool you can uncover related keywords (like ‘remote dog training collar’) that you can add to your article.

Also, avoid stuffing your page with keywords to try and boost its ranking (this will actually be bad for your site) – a good rule of thumb is to make sure it reads naturally.

Second, you want to mention your keyword in the h1 heading tag of your page. This will indicate to the search engines that the keyword you are targeting is important to the page.

It can also pay to try and bold, italicize or underline your main keyword once or twice on your page. Don’t go overboard with this, however. If you do, your content will take on a ‘spammy‘ look and will trigger red flags from the search engines.

4. Using ‘alt‘ tags for your images

It is important to add good ‘alt‘ tags to your images. Rather than trying to stuff your image alt tags with a whole list of keywords to boost your search engine rankings (this is an old trick that no longer works) you should be adding tags that are relevant to the image.

Create an alt tag that first describes the image accurately, and try to include a keyword or two if it looks natural and relevant.

For example if you have an image of a dog training eBook don’t make the alt tag something like ‘dog training eBook, dog training manual, dog training guide’. Instead, create a relevant and descriptive alt tag like ‘my dog training eBook cover’.

Here is what an alt tag should look like:

Remember that search engines cannot actually see the images you put online, they can only read your descriptions of them (the alt tags). Therefore, it pays to make your ‘alt‘ tags accurate and descriptive.

For a more detailed guide to using alt tags for your images, read the Alt Attributes page on About.com.

5. Keeping your content fresh

Search engines love fresh and new content, so a key component of optimizing your site is to update it regularly. You can create new pages or blog posts, as well as updating your existing pages to reflect changes.

A good rule to apply here is to write for your readers first, and search engines second. Create articles, pages, and posts that people will want to read. Then tweak them based on the strategies mentioned above and you will reap the rewards.

Content is king on the Internet, especially after recent updates to Google that have placed even more emphasis on rewarding quality content. For an in-depth analysis of this subject read Joe Brockmeier’s guide to the importance of content for SEO.

6. Creating links within your site

Creating anchor text links within your website to and from relevant pages is another useful on page SEO method. A good internal linking structure will help get your pages indexed in the search engines.

Because you have complete control over the anchor text used, make sure to use descriptive keywords for your internal links that also match the keywords you are trying to rank for.

Using internal links within your site will also help to reduce your bounce rate (meaning visitors stay on your site for longer and don’t exit your website on the page they entered). A low bounce rate will help boost your search engine rankings.

7. Checking your on page SEO

You can also use Traffic Travis to analyze your on page SEO and check for ‘Page Warnings’ where your website might not be properly optimized.

The easiest way to do this is to use the My Site tool (where you imported your pages before) and look out for ‘Page Warnings’. Click on the ‘Page Warnings’ number to see a comprehensive list of what on-page SEO you are doing well, and what things you need to improve.

Here is an example:

Pay close attention to the warnings, and then fix as many of them as you can.

Optimizing your pages for your target keywords using the techniques you have learned today will help you blow past competitors who haven’t taken the time to set up their sites as well as you have.

To recap, today we have covered:

• How to use title tags.
• How to increase click-through using meta-desciptions.
• How to optimize your written content for your chosen.
• The importance of proper ‘alt‘ tags for images.
• Why you should keep your site’s content fresh.
• Why you should build a good internal link structure for your site.

In the next newsletter we’ll take a look at off-page SEO factors. In the meantime, check over your site and see if you can improve its on page SEO using the tips above.

Wishing you every success, ‘til next time,
Traffic Travis

Source: Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/0284

Part 1: How To Do Keyword Research For Your Site

Selecting the right keywords to get visitors to your website is one of the key aspects of Internet marketing. There are a few basic steps you need to go through when hunting out the keywords you are going to use on your website.

Today we are going to cover:

• Using Traffic Travis to hunt out good keywords and avoid the ‘bad’ ones.
• Selecting the right parameters when picking keywords (including language and location).
• How to pick a good domain name (if you don’t have one already) based on the keywords you find.

Picking good keywords and avoiding the ‘bad’ keywords

What makes a ‘good’ keyword good, and what makes a ‘bad’ keyword bad? There are a few criteria that we can use to find good keywords, these include:

• Low competition. What defines too much competition? There are no hard and fast rules. But using the Competition checker in Traffic Travis will give you a good idea of whether a keyword has too much competition or not. Traffic Travis uses multiple factors to calculate competition. And provides a difficulty rating on a scale from ‘very easy’ to ‘very difficult’.

  In this example (found using the Traffic Travis Competition checker – ‘SEO’ , ‘Competition’) you can see that ‘dog training’ is going to be very difficult to rank for, while ‘problems with training dog’ will be much easier.

  
• High search volume. There is no point ranking highly for a keyword if nobody is searching for it. Generally the higher the search volume the better. However, this needs to be balanced with the level of competition. A good minimum to aim for is 200 global ‘exact’ searches per month (we will cover what ‘exact’ keywords are in a moment).
• Relevant to the website topic. Most websites are based around a theme or niche. You want the keywords you are building your site around to be relevant to the topic. For example, if your website is about dog training, then keywords about training your hamster are going to be of little use.
• Likely to convert. There is a big difference between ‘browsers’ and ‘buyers’. You want keywords that attract buyers (for higher conversion rates) rather than those who are simply browsing for free information – even though the search volume for buyer keywords is usually much lower. An example of a browsing keyword would be ‘free dog training tips’ compared to the buyer keyword ‘best dog training book’.
• Competitive costs per click (CPC). If you are going to be marketing your website using pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords then you want keywords that won’t cost you a fortune to build an ad campaign around. If your site sells a $30 product, then it’s going to be hard to make money if you are paying $5 a click.

Using the right search method for your keywords

Traffic Travis features a powerful keyword research tool that offers different ways of searching for keywords.

From the dashboard, click on ‘Research’ then ‘Keywords’ to open up the Keyword analysis. You can then search for keywords using a ‘broad’, ‘exact’, or ‘phrase’ search.

Access this ‘Keyword Match Type’ menu by clicking ‘Advanced Settings’ from within the Traffic Travis Keyword Tool (see image below).

‘Broad’ keywords are not very specific. If you use this option then keywords that are loosely related to your initial phrase or word will be displayed. Searches for these deliver the widest possible range of results. However, broad keyword searching can also deliver less relevant keyword ideas.

‘Phrase’ searches contain your initial phrase, but with other possible words included. This brings more specific and more targeted results than a broad search.

For example, a search about ‘dog training’ could bring back results on ‘dog obedience training’ or ‘dog training for obedience’.

‘Exact’ keyword searches contain your initial phrase in its exact order, and are the best for finding closely related keywords that you might also rank for. Use the Traffic Travis keyword tool set to ‘Exact’ (like in the picture above) for the most accurate search volume results and best potential keywords.

Below is an example of ‘Exact’ keywords found by Traffic Travis for the phrase ‘dog training’. Notice how they are all highly relevant to the original phrase. Also notice that ‘dog training collars’ is one of those potential buyer keywords you should look out for; it has 8,100 global searches per month (over our 200 count minimum) and mentions a specific product type.

Read the Google Adwords guide to keyword matching options to learn more about broad, phrase, and exact matches and how they relate to keyword research.

Keyword Localization

If you are building a site based on a local business or service, or specific to a particular area (city, region, or country) then you want to be searching for keywords that are localized.

From the ‘Keyword Match Type’ menu under ‘Advanced Settings’ in the Keyword Research Tool you can pick keywords by country and language too (see image below).

For example, if you have a website called Dog Training in California it would make sense to search for keywords related to dog training coming only from American search engine users. Traffic Travis allows you to select keywords based on location and language.

For those of you building a website in a language other than English, make sure you tell Traffic Travis what language you want keywords for.

Picking A Domain Name Based On Your Keywords

Now that you know how to pick keywords, it is important to build those keywords into your site. Picking a domain name (e.g. http://www.example.com ) with your main keyword phrase is one way to increase your chance of ranking well in the search engines.

If you are using this method, ideally you want to pick a domain name that is an exact match for the keyword you are targeting. Traffic Travis has a domain finder tool that enables you to look up domain names based on your keywords. You can instantly see whether the .com, .net, or .org domain name extensions are available to buy.

To do this, access the domains tool from the ‘Research’ panel of Traffic Travis, and then add keywords you want to consider domain names for. You will see something similar to the image below:

You can access the ‘Domains’ tool from the Research panel of Traffic Travis. You can also shortlist and purchase domains from within Traffic Travis – this is a very useful time-saving feature.

You may also notice that Traffic Travis only offers to show .com, .net, or .org domain names. These top-level domains (TLDs) are the best for getting high search engine rankings, especially if your site is aimed at a global or US-based market.

Traffic Travis Keyword Research FAQs

Here are the answers to the most common questions or problems that people experience when researching keywords with Traffic Travis:

• “I can’t find any data when searching for keywords”. Make sure you are connected to the Internet, and that you have logged in with a Google account when prompted by the keyword tool. To return results for the keyword tool you also need to have Internet Explorer 7 (or above) installed on your computer (and not have the plugin ‘Google Frame’ for IE7 installed).
• “Google keeps blocking me. What can I do?”. If you are getting blocked by Google then you will probably need to wait an hour or so before searching again from within Traffic Travis. You should also set up some proxies if possible. Another thing that might help is increasing the Timer Delay from (File > Program Options > Internet). This will slow down your searches a bit and reduce your chance of being blocked.

To recap, today we have covered:

• The difference between Buyer vs Browsing Keywords.
• Using Traffic Travis to find keyword ideas.
• The difference between ‘broad’, ‘exact’, and ‘phrase’ match keywords.
• Localizing keywords to a particular language or location.

In the next newsletter we’ll take a look at optimizing your website content for high search engine rankings. In the meantime, have a go with the Traffic Travis keyword research tool and find some great keyword ideas for your website!

Wishing you every success, ’till next time,
Traffic Travis

Source : Traffic Travis http://www.traffictravis.com/newsletters/0125