After much deliberation, I decided to hire my first Virtual Assistant (VA) from First Page Web Search.

As the site says to do, I emailed “admin(at)firstpagewebsearch(dot)com” to request a part-time SEO VA, which costs a super-affordable $37.50 for 20 hours a week.

The company owner/manager, Jake, replied:

Right now, we do need one week confirmation payment. This covers the two days trial and 5 days work. This is a policy we implemented since we had previous clients who runaway after the two days trial. We hope you understand. If in case you’re not happy with the service, we can arrange a new VA or we refund the whole amount.

Please pay using the link below:

(PayPal link removed)

I will then forward the VA contact details after we receive the payment.

So I completed the PayPal transaction and the next day received this email:

The “New Client Pack” had the following 3 files, which are pretty self explanatory.  The “Welcome Kit” is just a 1-page PDF with contact info for “First Page Web Search” departments.

So far so good!  My next update will be about my first impressions and communication with my new VA named “Jemelo”.

Time Tracking & Analysis

So I’ve religiously logged my time for a couple weeks now (using a desktop widget from Paymo.biz), and come to the following conclusions -

Virtual Assistant Providers

Job posting boards

Outsourcing companies

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)!