SEO, the HTML Source Code and Competition

You have a business, and ever since you started the SEO campaign, business has been good and most of your business enquiries have been coming via your website. You are getting professional SEO support and an ongoing SEO program takes care of all your SEO work.They have optimized your website and now it attracts a fairly good quantity of relevant incoming traffic which has been resulting in good business enquiries and sales. Now, suppose you have other competitors for your business in your region and would like to know if your competitors also have an SEO campaign going on with their website. As you are ignorant on this issue it has been making you anxious. They have always been your stiff competitors so you can't just call them up and ask about it! So what do you do?

Ok, if you want to find out about your competitors are also optimizing their website it is a very simple process to find it out. It is not necessary for you to send some one out to spy on your competitors to get this information because it will only take you a few minutes to find out and confirm this information online. All you need to do is just go to your competitor's website and check on its HTML source Code!

This is how one should go about it. Go to the concerned web site's homepage on the browser and click on "view" and choose "source" and the HTML source code page opens up. If you are using Internet Explorer 2.x, right-click on the web page, and then click View Source. To view the HTML source code for a web page that contains frames, right- click the web page in a frame, and then choose "view source". Looking at this page you will be able to get the required information.

On this HTML source code page, just see if there are main keywords in the header tags KEYWORDS , the title tags , and in the image alt tags KEYWORDS . These are always located near the top of the source code. Also if the content on the webpage has been optimized for the search engines, you will find that the text on the web page contains a minimal repeated use of the keyword. These clues are more than enough to confirm the fact that your competitor is also smart enough to have gone for website optimization. (Now you have another new area of competition and must outsmart him)

The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of Outsource Strategies International (OSI), a US based company that offers services in Search Engine Optimization, SEM, PPC advertising for clients across the US.

Alexa Traffic Rank - Improve Your Low Ranking

Informing Alexa Of All Website Visitors

I wanted Alexa to know about "ALL" visitors my traffic exchange website was receiving, not just traffic from their toolbar users. I wanted them to know not because I support them, but because so many other users did. Users that were apparently unaware of the traffic-ranking prejudice. I accomplished this by installing the Alexa traffic rank banner on all of the pages within my website.

Free Advertising

The Alexa traffic rank banner is a free advertisment for them. Adding their banner to your site is a small price to pay for the increase in traffic rank. They offer several types of banners in different sizes, so it should be easy to one that fits your pages.

Since installing the code on January 15, 2007, the traffic rank for checks4free.com had improved by over 4.5 million within 15 days. That does not mean there was that much traffic. It means that the website had moved up the list from the number 6 million spot to approximately the 1 million spot.

You can view the Alexa traffic rank for the Checks4Free Traffic Exchange using this URL: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=checks4free.com.

Conclusion

If your website has a low Alexa traffic rank, I hope the suggestion in this article will help you to improve your ranking as well. The help file on the Alexa website talks about the biased ranking. However, to the millions of users that base an opinion about a website using the Alexa traffic rank, numbers speak louder than words. Your only other option is to hope that more Alexa toolbar users visit your website.

Tim Predaina is with Checks 4 Free, a free manual traffic exchange - http://www.checks4free.com - that delivers real visitors to your websites. Visit: http://copywriting.predaina.com for information about writing articles for content to build traffic.

R4

Do Good CAPTCHAs Really Have To Be Unfriendly? An Expert Explains

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, a CAPTCHA is a feature on many user populated websites, such as Myspace with the purpose of blocking automated programs from spamming its users and for overall security. Here is how it works:

A user is required to enter a random letter and number password into a form before being able to submit information, log in, etc. This password is essentially given directly to the user in an image, rather than in text form, so that an automated program cannot detect the characters. The password the form field expects is the same as that shown on the image, but this sometimes causes problems.

Jeff Atwood at the Coding Horrors blog discusses whether CAPTCHAs are dead. This follows a news report that scalpers probably beat the CAPTCHAs at Ticketmaster.

Jeff links to a Chinese site that sells CAPTCHA decoders. The site quotes different prices for breaking different CAPTCHAs. An eBay decoder, for example, is being sold for $4000 and claims 70% accuracy.

What caught my attention were the unbreakable CAPTCHAs in the list. The Yahoo CAPTCHA is listed as unbreakable. That isn't surprising. Most of us can barely get it right ourselves.

Consider a Yahoo CAPTCHA. Sometimes you cannot tell the difference between a G or a 6? And the way that letters are often skewed, the difference bewteen certain uppercase and lowercase letters is virtually unrecognizable?

Contrast that with a Google CAPTCHA also listed as unbreakable. The Google image is clean and legible. Most of us have no difficulty getting it right. Google demonstrates that effective CAPTCHAs don't have to be unfriendly to users.

I am curious to learn which CAPTCHA libraries generate strong, yet user friendly challenges.