Hey everybody!

Today we're pleased to announce that we're bringing all the great research and site management tools of Traffic Travis Version Four to you, for FREE!

Yes, available from our homepage today is the Free Edition of Traffic Travis Version 4!

Go even deeper than Traffic Travis V3 and get closer site analytics, more in-depth keyword research, and more intense SEO optimization than ever before!

As the free edition, there are some restrictions compared to Traffic Travis Version 4 Professional; these include:

• A maximum of 5 projects
• A maximum of 100 keywords per project
• A maximum of 5 keywords per search in the SEO Competition, Domain Research and Keyword research tools
• No custom logo on exported PDF reports
• Some other restrictions on search results in certain tools
• None of the exclusive professional bonus webinars which teach you some really amazing link building, email marketing and SEO secrets!

We've determined that for 90% of users, these restrictions won't be a problem; however, if you really need more than what Traffic Travis v4 Free can provide, remember that you can purchase Traffic Travis v4 Professional for just $97.

To make sure you don't have any difficulty changing to Traffic Travis Version 4, here's a video showing you how to use the Project Migrator, to get your projects from V3 to V4!

We're also a little sad to announce that you will no longer be able to download or register for Traffic Travis v3. However, we will continue to support Traffic Travis v3 for customers with existing TTv3 Free or Pro licenses, and we will continue to release bugfix updates for a little while yet!

To get your copy of Traffic Travis Version 4 Free, download it from http://www.traffictravis.com/register

Enjoy!

Kind Regards,

The Traffic Travis Team!

P.S. Just remember, if you want even more sexy data, you can get Traffic Travis Professional Edition for just $97 at http://www.traffictravis.com/professional

 Hello Everybody!

As part of our ongoing quest to improve Traffic Travis, we've set up a brand new, and far more responsive, feedback system! 

Today we're pleased to announce that, as part of the latest Traffic Travis release, we've replaced our Roadmap and Survey with a brand new UserVoice Feedback system!

UserVoice lets you suggest ideas and improvements for Traffic Travis, as well as view, vote and comment on ideas from your fellow users! Now you can see whether other people want the same thing you want, vote for ideas you like, and leave comments! Together, as a community, you can now vote on the ideas you like most, so we can provide you the most requested features faster.

UserVoice now also lets us keep you more up-to-date: now we can let you when we've begun work on an idea and when we expect to include it in Traffic Travis, keeping you in the loop at all times!

Join the community today, at http://feedback.traffictravis.com

Since TTv4 was launched the developers have been busy working on adding and tweaking features, as well as improving the stability of the software. We have recorded a short video showing some of the improvements made to the software over the past month.

Over the next few weeks we'll be finishing off areas of the software which still need attention, improving the feedback system and making changes to our development process. When that's done, and we are happy with it, we'll release a Mac version 4-5 weeks after.

As always we welcome any feedback you have.

Kind Regards,
Nick Fauchelle

Link building is probably the most important process in Search Engine Optimization and certainly the toughest and most tedious one to execute. Making your link prospecting a consistently implemented part of your SEO campaign is essential, as this allows your site to scale its marketing campaign, which can result to a sustainable growth in traffic.

Acquiring high quality links from highly trusted domains is known to influence ranking web pages; it’s a common factor that makes many sites and their pages show prominently on SERPs. The good news is that the new version of Traffic Travis has made it much easier for you to find link opportunities, through various features and site/page metrics that can help you identify high quality external web pages that you can acquire links from.

Below are some of the features of Traffic Travis v4 that you can use to improve your campaign in searching for high-quality link opportunities:

1. Keyword Research

One of the foundations of finding link opportunities for your off-page optimization campaign is searching sites/pages that target the keywords you are aiming to rank for. Similarly, finding related search terms can return highly relevant pages that you can acquire links from.

Traffic Travis’ Keyword Research feature allows you to extract data such as a list of keyword ideas/suggestions, global search count, competition, number of pages using the keyword(s) in title and the difficulty of ranking for the keyword.

However, at this stage, we will be using this feature to scale the capacity of your outreach list building by identifying other link opportunities through the other related keywords that the tool will suggest. The more you uncover link opportunities for your site, the more you can improve your site’s prominence in search results. Here are the steps on how you can utilize this feature for link search:

• Make a list of all the suggested keywords that will fit your campaign perfectly, or export the results in an Excel sheet format and then highlight the keywords that you’ll be using to find link prospects.
• Search for the top ranking pages for each keyword that you have listed. Identify and separate relevant pages from strong domains as priority when you start with your campaign’s link acquisition.
• You can use Traffic Travis’ Competition and Backlink’s Overview feature to find these pages and to analyze each page’s site metrics (Domain Authority, PageRank, number of linking domains/IP addresses and percentage of followed incoming links).

2. Link Finder

The new Traffic Travis also has a Link Finder feature that makes finding backlinks almost effortless. On the SEO tab, you can find the Link Finder panel; here, you can easily get a list of highly relevant pages, where you can build your links, by entering your targeted search term. The information is designed to help users easily identify valuable link opportunities; the retrieved data is evaluated using some of the following page metrics:

• Page type (if it’s a static page or a blog)
• Link attribute (if the page attribute links as nofollow or followed)
• PageRank of the Page
• Page Authority
• Approximate link juice that the page will be able to pass through

You can sort the list based on link attributes, PageRank, URL filters and Page type for specific targeting. The data is also downloadable in CSV format, which makes link valuation and segmentation more accessible for you.

3. Reverse Engineering your Competitors’ Links

Examining your top competitors’ linking activity is a vital part of link building, since this method enables you to know why your competitors’ are ranking well and, more importantly, gives you an idea of how you can outrank them, by showing you the domains/pages that have linked to them.

In Traffic Travis’ Competition feature (which is located on the SEO tab), you can see the top competing pages for a certain keyword, including page metrics like PageRank, Backlink count as well as the number of unique domains and IP addresses linking to the page.

When you double-click on the number of backlinks directing to a competitor’s page, the tool will direct you to the Backlinks panel, where you can see the actual pages linking back to your competitor(s). You can choose to sort the backlinks’ data through URL filters, PageRank of the linking pages and the anchor text used to link to your competitor’s page.

This panel also allows you to assess the external linking pages to your competitor, as page metrics are indicated on the right side part of each linking page (this includes Page Authority, PageRank, Alexa Rank, and the anchor text used for the link).

To further refine your link competition analysis, you can check the backlinks’ Site Breakdown section, to check statistics such as the number of high PageRank, TLDs, IP addresses and anchor text distribution of pages from external websites linking to that.

Identifying the strong external pages that support your competitors (or basically the links that allows your competitors to rank highly on SERPs) will give you a set of high-value link opportunities that you can use for your own link building campaign. List all the high quality pages that you have found through this process and plan how you can acquire the same type of link from those domains (for example, by contacting the webmasters).

4. My Site

Staging a good internal linking structure for your site is a vital part of link development, as this process allow search engine spiders to easily access and index pages – especially deeper pages – in your site. Using highly descriptive anchor texts for your internal links can also help improve your important pages’ search rankings, particularly if you have built the internal links thematically and contextually from strong pages of the site in order to pass more link juice to pages that you want prioritized.

Traffic Travis’ My Site feature monitors strong as well as weak pages in your site. The My Site feature provides data about individual pages/posts within the site, including each page’s PageRank, number of backlinks, Page Warnings and SEO warnings.

Determine the strong pages in your site, especially those that have received a lot of link juice from other domains, as you can base your internal linking structure by setting these strong pages to contextually link (using your target keywords) to pages that you are optimizing to rank higher on search results. Allow more link juice to flow internally from your popular pages to your target landing pages directly to improve link equity and to reduce the necessity of building irrelevant and manipulative incoming links to your preferred landing pages.

Don't yet have your copy of Traffic Travis v4.0? Grab your copy at http://www.traffictravis.com/professional for only $97, and try it risk-free for 60 days!

Link building is an important phase of marketing and optimizing a website, to make it prominent on search engine result pages.

Links are one of the value indicators used by search engines in order to rank web pages’ importance, popularity and relevancy, in which the more pages from other websites that are citing your page as a reliable and trusted source of information, the more it gets popular and, eventually, the more it is able to be returned to their users as a result for their search queries.   

This process of search engine optimization is composed of two parts – link prospecting and actual link acquisition. Link prospecting is a crucial stage of a site’s link development, given that search engines only give value to high quality links these days. The procedure for identifying good link prospects for your site has two major parts: finding link opportunities and determining the value of those link opportunities.

6 Ways to Find Link Opportunities

There are plenty of ways to find topically relevant websites and web pages where you can try to get a link:

1. Advanced Search Queries

The use of advanced search commands on Google Search (e.g. “site:domaintype + keywords”, “intitle:keywords”, “inurl:keywords” “link:domain -site:domain”, “related:domainname”  and “define:keywords”) will allow you to retrieve more relevant results, which you can use in listing sites that you might be able to acquire high quality links from.

2. Studying your competitors’ links and relationships

Reverse-engineer your competitors’ links through Traffic Travis’ backlinks section. You can also study their linking relationships by checking their blogrolls or list of recommended sites, which can expand the reach of your link building campaign as you are able to track other linking opportunities from their relationships’ link profile. 

3. Web Directories

Large web directories such as Dmoz, Best of the Web and Yahoo Business Directory can also help you mine more thematic link opportunities, given that most websites listed on this type of directory are well established. You can also choose to scale your link prospecting campaign by mining the pages linking to the sites you have found listed on these directories (through Yahoo Site Explorer or Traffic Travis).   

4. Twitter Search

In this age of marketing, where Social Media has been emerging, it’s almost certain that most websites on any niche have Twitter accounts integrated into them. Use your targeted keywords to find influential people in your industry through Twitter’s search feature as, more often than not, the URL of their websites are included on their profile.     

5. Google Alerts

You can also keep your link building campaign updated by setting up an alert for your site’s targeted keywords via Google Alerts. It’s a free email service from Google, which sends new related results from their index based on your targeted search terms (on daily, weekly or monthly basis).

6. Link search through related foreign websites

Most link builders tend to focus on global and local search when searching for link prospects and sometimes fail to spot a whole lot of opportunities from other channels. Finding and exploring link opportunities through localized Google Search (e.g. Google.de, Google.com.ph, Google.kr, etc…) or country-based web directories will enable you to extract more diverse link opportunities from topically relevant websites, as well as to get ideas on how you can elevate your own strategy by evaluating their link building efforts.  

This process will also enable your campaign to maximize its reach by exploring these foreign websites’ link profiles, which will eventually give you more link prospects to reach out.

19 Ways to Determine the Value of Link Opportunities

There are several link value measurements that you can use to determine if a website or webpage will be able to carry high amount of link juice to your site. There are three main parts:

Domain-level Metrics

• Domain Authority – measurable through SEOmoz’s data (which we use in Traffic Travis).
• Domain Trust – the best way to know if a link prospect is trusted by Google is by copying any of the site’s inner page’s title and searching it on Google. If the page is returned and displayed on Google’s top page (much better if it’s within the top 5 results), then it’s a signal that the domain is highly trusted.
• High Traffic – can be measured through Alexa traffic rank and/or Compete.com. Acquiring links from sites that have high traffic can get your site more click-through visitors if obtained links have good placements.    
• Site Indexation – a site’s indexation rate can simply be gauged by comparing the ratio of the site’s number of indexed pages on Google and the number of internal links on the site’s homepage. A robust domain is capable of having its deeper pages indexed by search engines, and having many pages indexed without the support of internal links from the domain’s main page means that it has a good site structure and has managed to build incoming links to keep the site’s deep pages regularly crawled.   
• Domain’s Age – search engines reward more trust on older domains, which simply means links acquired from old domains can carry a lot of link value. However it’s also best to get links from newer websites to naturalize your site’s link growth through the diversity of its links. For links acquired from old and newly published websites, it’s crucial to weigh its potentials as well as the future value of the links (will the linking page stay on the web for a long time?). The easiest way to determine the durability of your link prospects is by checking their sites’ updates, if they are weekly or monthly updating a blog or resource pages. 
• Good Search Rankings – you can measure a site’s search engine traffic performance through SEMrush or Alexa’s Site info, wherein you’ll be able to see the top keywords that are sending traffic to their site as well as the approximate value of their traffic.
• Number of incoming links to the entire site – another good metric to use in indicating if a site is still active or still updating the site is by checking its link profile, where you can usually track the age of their links and if they are still getting new links. A site that have hundreds or thousands of links linking to it is also a good sign of link value that you’ll be getting from them, seeing as the links that they have acquired will pass through link juice and authority to your site.  
  

Page-level Metrics

• PageRank – this metric from Google is still reliable in some ways, though a little outdated. It’s best used in targeting pages for link outreach purposes (most commonly on resource pages, homepage blogrolls, recommended links, etc…).
• MozRank – a good alternative in measuring a page’s importance/popularity, since SEOmoz’s Linkscape updates this toolbar much faster compared to PageRank.
• External link attributes – it’s also important to identify the link attributes that your link prospects are giving (if the links they cite are followed or nofollow). It’s known that dofollow links pass higher value than nofollow links.
• Number of incoming links – the amount of backlinks that your target page has is a strong indication of a valuable link, as it will be very much capable of passing link juice from internal links within the domain directing to it as well as from other domains linking to that page.
• Link’s placement – the higher the link will be placed on the page’s content, the more value it is able to carry, since web crawlers have more access to links placed on the higher section of the body (within content).
• Anchor text – if the page allowed keywords or highly-descriptive anchors for the links it host.
• Difficulty – the level of difficulty in pursuing the link, given that time is very important when it comes to link building. 
• Quality of content – if the content of the page offers useful content and is authentically worth linking to, since obtaining a link from pages that are of use to many of their visitors can draw referred traffic to your site. 
• Durability – if the target page will stay useful to their visitors or if the page will stay on Google’s index for a long time.

Negative signals

• Presence of spam links – a page that is linking to spammy websites reduces its link value, as the external page that it’s related to or vouching for affects its ability to pass trustworthy citations. Getting links from sites’ that are linking out to questionable pages, bad neighborhood sites and topically irrelevant sites with obvious manipulative anchor texts (like gambling sites and adult-content sites) can make a bad impression for your links and may also be tagged by search engines as spam if it’s seen along with them.
• Presence of paid links – paid links can be easily detected if the target page has a “sponsored links” placed anywhere in the sidebar or footer area of the site. Google penalizes page that take part on these activities, which can put your site at risk once they are caught.
• Excessive outbound linking – acquiring links from web pages that contain more than 150 external links will pass little to no value to your site, knowing that web crawlers will only prioritize the ones that are placed on the higher position of the page.

Do you have another method for identifying quality backlinks? Share it below and go in the draw to win a copy of Traffic Travis v4 (Valued at $97.00)