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April 08, 2008
3 Resources for Your Search Marketing Tool Box.
By Scott Goodyear
Often when you sign up for an email account, blog account, or other service, a "captcha" is used to verify that you are setting up a real account. In regards to blogs, it is often a great way to avoid getting tons of automated, spammy comments that do little to add to a conversation. However captchas can often be humorous in their own way.
The 3 sample captchas below ask that enter in two words. But do you SEE two words?:
Luckily, there is a refresh option to download a new image. According to recaptcha.net, the images above are scans from books where the scanning software had trouble reading the page. Obviously, in some cases, humans would have problems reading the images. Annoying for sure, but having to refresh the image might be seen as an extra security measure since a real human would have to refresh the image to get a legible image. Hacking /spamming software might instead use a brute force attack to keep pounding terms from a dictionary into the presented captcha in order to crack it. If you've been looking for a way to screen humans who want to post on your blog, sign up for a newsletter, etc. you might consider recaptcha as it is a free service for most applications.
Ever hit a URL and find that it is down? Wonder if it was down for everyone or just from the IP address that you are coming from? There is a great tool at, not too uncoincidentally: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
While I'm unsure about how they test URLs, I have found it useful in my own job. I had a customer tell me that their URL was live and that they saw it, but when I tried going there, the URL was not live. As it turns out, the site was only available from their own, intranet.
Finally, if you are monitoring some of the web 2.0 sites out there like Twitter, try using http://www.tweetscan.com/. You can have it scan Twitter for several keywords and set up an RSS feed or send an email with results. This is a great way to see what people are saying about you, your company, or topics that you are interested in.
For example, our interim CEO is stepping down as we've hired an ex-Googler to be the new WebTrends CEO 
.
As you can guess, this news is is being discussed right now. By the look of these comments, good things are being said!
Hopefully these three resources help to get the creative wheels spinning about how you can improve your site and interact with customers, and more. Good luck in your SEO efforts!
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