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)!

This is the latest piece of software that I’ve had to request a refund for.

It has promise, don’t get me wrong.  There’s just too many bugs for me to handle.

SocialBot (version 4.0 was the one I tried) was created by a company called IncanSoft. I’m not entirely sure but I think they’re based out of Greece, from reading about them on WarriorForum.

The purpose of this software is to quickly submit pages from your websites to up to 54 social bookmarking services.    This list includes many of the popular ones like Digg, Technorati, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google, etc.

Here’s how it works (supposedly):

• Setup a company (could be yourself, could be a client if you’re submitting someone else’s website)
• Setup a website that you want to submit social bookmarks for
• Setup a profile (a list of social bookmarking services you want to submit to)
• Let SocialBot spider your website and find all the pages, or manually setup the pages yourself
• Modify the keywords or descriptions for each page being submitted (or leave as is)
• Click “GO” and everything should work like a charm

Well, let me just say that I really, really, really was hoping it would work as advertised.  I launched SocialBot all wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, eager to let all my social bookmarking dreams become reality.

Unfortunately it was just not meant to be.

Here’s what went wrong:

• First I tried the “spider” functionality which is supposed to traverse through your domain and find all the unique pages.  Unfortunately it had trouble with link-loops (ie. page A links to page B which links back to page A).  One of my sites with about 30 pages, somehow had over 1000 pages according to SocialBot, until I killed the “spider” process.
• I tested it out by just submitting to a single service, Delicious.  The submission “failed” and I went into the Submission Review field but it was completely blank.  I managed to figure out by myself that the password I had entered was incorrect, but gee, thanks for being so helpful SocialBot!  Sigh.
• After I made a successful submission to Delicious, I manually loaded up the site in FireFox and checked to see what my submitted page looked like.  To my utter disgust the tags were all fuxored.  I had entered comma-separated tags in SocialBot, but apparently multiple-word tags aren’t possible, because all of my multiple-word tags in Delicious were broken up into single words.  (if you’re familiar with my posts you may remember that I’m sort of a tag-Nazi)
• I emailed all three above problems to IncanSoft “support”, which was really just the email address of “Big Mike”, the CEO/president/janitor.  His trusty sidekick Diego replied saying,

Thanks for your feedback; We are releasing an upgrade at the end of the month, and I’m going to test the bugs you found if they are a real problem.

• I thought, ok, no big deal, I can live with the above three issues.  So I then created a profile which contained maybe 20 of my favorite social bookmarking services. I queued up 10 or so pages from one of my sites that I wanted to submit to all of them.  Then I clicked “Go”.  And waited.  And waited some more.  And had a beer.  And came back and noticed that only a single page had been submitted to a whopping 2 services.  In about an hour.  This was the final straw.

So after all that fun stuff, I requested a refund, which I was given quite quickly so that was nice.  Now I’m not sure if SocialBot is just buggy on 64 bit Windows XP, because I occasionally have issues with software that don’t exist on other operating systems.  But…even the bugs aside…the speed is what really irked me…

I can honestly submit my sites faster manually to those social bookmarking services than automatically using SocialBot.

So, two thumbs down from me.  Sorry “Big Mike”.

Edit – June 6, 2010

I’ve had a lot of people asking me if I’ve found a better tool than SocialBot. Well, since this review I’ve gone ahead and created my own social bookmarking service – SocialAdr – which is entirely web-based, automated, and submits bookmarks from thousands of different accounts. Contact me for a special coupon code!

As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of WordPress.  I’ve used a few other Content Management Systems (like Joomla, Drupal, PHP-Nuke, etc.).  But I’ve found that for internet marketing, WordPress is simply hard to beat with its ease-of-use, maintenance simplicity, and the huge community support of free plugins and themes.

So, here’s the list of plugins that I routinely use with each WordPress installation:

Akismet

• Catches spam Comments on your posts or pages.
• I find that it’s very accurate.
• You do have to enter a WordPress API key though to activate it (which I’m not a big fan of doing…why does WordPress need to know what spam I’m receiving?).
• Does anyone know why it has such a strange name that has nothing to do with spam?

All in One SEO Pack

• I call this thing “Search Engine Optimization For Dummies”
• You don’t really have to know much about SEO to get some serious benefits from it
• It can do custom HTML headers like keywords, descriptions, titles
• You can even set “noindex” for different types of archives so you won’t get hurt by having duplicate content

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

• An easy-to-use HTML sitemap generator
• Tons of features, super configurable, but not complicated

Exec-PHP

• Occasionally with some sites I need to execute PHP within posts, this plugin makes it extremely easy
• If you don’t know what PHP is skip this one

GoCodes

• URL shortener and click tracker all-in-one!
• Simple interface
• Great for hiding affiliate links (instead of using http://youraffiliateID.vendorID.hop.clickbank.net you can use http://yourdomain.com/go/FriendlyProductName)

Google XML Sitemaps

• Rather than creating an HTML sitemap, like the plugin I mentioned above, this one creates an XML sitemap
• It also notifies many popular search engines when changes are made
• Tons of options, but works great out-of-the-box

Thumbnail Viewer

• Sometimes I like putting image thumbnails in my posts so visitors can click the thumbnail hyperlinks to see the full image
• That’s exactly what this bad boy is for
• It’s very simple and fast (full images load real quick)

WordPress.com Stats [Edit - June 30 - Now I like "StatPress SEOlution" better!]

• If you’ve ever used WordPress.com to host a site, you’re familiar with their admin “stats” page
• That’s exactly what this plugin emulates, except it works for sites you host yourself
• You must enter your WordPress API key to activate it (you can get this for free from WordPress.com)
• My only complaint is that it doesn’t show unique visitors, only “views”
• It tracks UNIQUE VISITORS and other cool stuff like which countries visitors are from and search engine spider stats

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

• Dynamically determines which posts are related to each other
• Places links at the end of each post so visitors can then view the related posts
• Lots of options, and easy to use

If you’re not sure how to find or install these plugins, you have two options:

1. From the WP admin panel, go “Plugins” > “Add New”, then use the “Search” form to find the plugins you want
2. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, download the ZIP files, then FTP the contents to your web server root/wp-content/plugins directory

This is what I use for submitting my sites to website directories.  I know there’s a debate about how useful “directories” are for improving search engine ranking, but it’s hard to argue with the benefits of getting a bunch of 1-way backlinks for free.

Some people complain that directories are a waste of time because “they’re sooooo 1999″ (ie. Web 1.0) and not hip and trendy like social bookmarking sites.  I don’t subscribe to that jazz.

Here’s the features that I like about Directory Submitter:

• Ability to see and sort by Google PageRank in the list of available directories (there’s 350!).  I only choose the ones with PR of 4 or higher.
• Can create a “project” for each of your sites and submit them all
• Tracking of which directory you’ve submitted each site to

This is the shit that annoys me:

• When you delete a directory it re-appears in the list the next time the app opens
• No way to just sit back and let the submissions happen automatically; you have to manually change between directories and projects

The complaints above may simply be because I’m too much of a cheap-ass to buy the full version so I’m stuck with limited functionality.  Anyways, I haven’t found anything better yet, but if you have let me know!

I’ve been using this app for about a month now.  Actually, it was the very first piece of commercial software I started using for internet marketing. After reading a bunch of good reviews on WarriorForum, I took a leap and bought it.

These are steps that I used to do manually, for each potential keyword phrase, one-by-one:

1. Google External Keyword Tool (# of monthly searches)
2. Microsoft Online Commercial Intention Tool (commercial intention)
3. Google.com (# of competition)
4. Yahoo Site Explorer (strength of competition)

I would then use these metrics to calculate the potential profitability of a new “niche” (keyword phrase).

Well now I do all that in Micro Niche Finder.   Those 4 steps are done automatically through MNF in mere seconds.   It even suggests related keywords and calculates their metrics at the same time.

Here’s a screenshot of the “meat & potatoes” of the app:

Note: I chose “fat loss” as my search phrase purely for this review.  I don’t actually think this is a good market to approach, as you can see by the numbers…the competition is insane!

And a quick description of what each column means:

• Phrase – these are related keywords that are automatically generated by MNF.  By default it shows results for the EXACT phrase (ie. a search in Google with “quotes”) but you can also choose BROAD (without quotes) or PHRASE (words out of order)

• Search Count - the total number of searches each month for this phrase on Google (ie. the DEMAND).  I usually only look at phrases with > 2000.

• Exact Phrase Count – these are the number of results for the phrase in Google (you can verify yourself by going to Google.com and typing in the phrase with “quotes”).  This is the COMPETITION.  I usually aim for phrases with < 20,000, but the COMPETITION / DEMAND ratio is also important.  If it’s, say 4, and the COMPETITION is 100,000, those are darn good numbers.

• Ad Cost – how much Google charges advertisers per click they receive on their AdWords ads based on this phrase.  This is usually relative to a combination of the Commercial Intent and Strength of Competition.

• Commercial Intent - how likely it is that a person searching this phrase on Google will end up buying something.  Anything less than 50% usually isn’t worth your time.

• Strength of Competition (SOC) – how strong the competition’s websites are.  This calculation considers things like PageRank, number of one-way backlinks, etc.  The lower the better!  That red X image turns into yellow (medium) or green (good) depending on how low the SOC values get.

Micro Niche Finder. Very. Useful. Tool.

Here’s more information on it if you’re interested…