I recently discovered to a free piece of software called Traffic Travis, which I’ve been using to help improve the search engine rankings of my client’s sites. Traffic Travis is essentially several tools combined into a single program. The two tools I want to talk about here are the Backlink checker and the Page analysis tool.

The Traffic Travis backlink checker is very slick. Input in any page url and you’ll get back a list of of all the pages linking back to you. Unlike some web-based tools, this one is quite fast. You’ll get back information like Anchor Text, IP Address, Page Rank, and Traffic rank for each individual backlink. What is unique about Traffic Travis is that it will compile information about all the backlinks to your site as a whole. This allows you to easily see what page rank the majority of your backlinks are, if the links are coming from different IP addresses, and what the most common anchor text is. This type of information is invaluable as I try to formulate my client’s link building strategy.

The Traffic Travis page analysis tool is also very cool. With it, you can easily figure out what on-page SEO factors you need to improve on for any given page. It can analyze whether your page has your keywords in your title, whether it has the appropriate keyword density, and many other important factors. All you need to do is give the tool a page url and a keyword phrase to rank for and it will grade your page on how well optimized it is and make suggestions on specific areas you should improve.

If you are doing any search engine optimization for your sites, I highly recommend that you give Traffic Travis a try. It’s free to download and play with. My only quibble with the program is that its for Windows only. Mac users are out of luck. Give it a shot, and you should see significant improvements to the rankings of your sites.

‘The JAR of this class file belongs to container ‘Plug-in Dependencies’ which does not allow modifications to source attachments on its entries.’

‘What the heck does that mean?’ It turns out, that we are using the Eclipse Target Platform mechanism and it didn’t include the source folders that come with the Eclipse SDK distribution itself. So the fix is easy. Just copy the appropriate source folders from your Eclipse install into the target platform and reload it. This might be obvious to any Eclipse guru, but it wasn’t apparent from searching for this error message on Google. So I hope this helps someone out.

Useful Textmate shortcut keys

Delete line: ⌃⇧K
Select word: ⌃W
Select line: ⇧⌘L
Select bundle item: ⌃⌘T
Open bundle menu: ^⎋
Go to file (Project context): ⌘T
Insert open/close tag: ^⇧,
Move to end of line and insert line feed: ⌘↩
Clipboard history: ^⌘⌥V

Legend

(I can never remember the symbols)
Ctrl = ^
Shift = ⇧
Cmd = ⌘
Option = ⌥
Esc = ⎋
Enter = ↩