If you’re like me and obsess over how your sites are ranking with the search engines, you’ve likely been looking for a tool that’s fast, user-friendly, and reliable. You may have tried some of the various FireFox plugins that are slow, buggy, and not good at tracking historical ranking changes.   Or perhaps you’ve tried one of the many websites that offers a Google position checker service but were disappointed in its speed and lack of features.

Well look no further…

Meet Traffic Travis.  

Here’s how it works:

First, you setup a “Project”.   This requires entering the name of the site you want to track, it’s URL, the search engines you want to use, and a list of keywords.  You can even enter competitor’s sites to see how they compare against your keywords, over time.

Next, you click “Start Update” and Traffic Travis goes to work.  Very quickly you see results coming in.   Whenever the current ranking beats the previous best ranking, a row is colored yellow.  And similarly, when the current ranking becomes worse, a row is colored blue.  Pretty handy for easily seeing where you stand.

Finally, Traffic Travis tracks all your historical ranking data.  You even get a cool graph or can print/export the data to BMP / HTML files.

If this was all the Traffic Travis could do, I’d be satisfied.

But it’s not…not even close.

Here’s a list of other features, some of which I haven’t even tried yet:

• Keyword research
• Backlink checker (also shows PageRank, noFollow, anchor text, and IP of each backlink…pimp!)
• PPC analysis
• Page analysis (how good is your on-page SEO?)
• SEO analysis (how competitive is certain keywords…for the top 20 listings in Google)

Last but not least, it just feels solid.  As a software developer, I can recognize good code when I see it.  For whatever reason, in the internet marketing world there’s a lot of bloated, slow, buggy, and visually unappealing…shit.  But Traffic Travis is sleek, slick, and sexy.  It’s no wonder that it’s had more than 100,000 downloads on Download.com and is considered by many to be the most popular SEO application EVER.

Well what the heck are ya waiting for?  Go get the best Google position checker (and bask in the glory of all the extra features you didn’t even know you wanted)!

A friend of mine was recently wondering, “What’s the difference between being ranked #1 and #2 on Google?”

He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.

Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!

While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.

• Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
• Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
• Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
• Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
• Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks

This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12!   Pretty big difference.

Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1

Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.

An excellent SEO service I’ve used in the past is Mariah’s SEO Blaster.  She’s very skilled at helping local and global businesses get ranked highly in all 3 of the above categories.

There’s a bunch of different ones out there but I prefer this one because it’s FREE and searches multiple phrases simultaneously:

Ventio – Google Position Tool

It tells you what search result # your site is with Google for specific phrases. Saves time by not having to manually check to see if your site’s Google-love is improving.