Google Alerts

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What is it?
This is a handy little service offered at no charge from Google that lets you know when certain web pages have changed.

Or blogs.
Or noticeboards.
Or forums.

It sends you an email so that you are automatically notified of any changes. You can then link this email to a text-message service if you want to receive an SMS about updates that are particularly important or urgent to you.

Why Have it Set-Up?
You're probably already aware that you can request that Ebay sends you an alert via email every time an article appears for sale that fits the profile you've set-up.

It saves hours of searching and re-searching through Ebay to see if there any bargains of a particular type of product has appeared. You can even do clever things like filter the results so that only items within a certain radius of your house are emailed to you.

Similarly, Google alerts enable you to stay on top of things that are important to you.

It may be that you want to know if your competitor has updated their website (e.g. a price) or whether a blog or article has been updated for example.

Specifically, if you're keen to stay on top of your search engine optimisation, having Google alerts set up will let you know about changes in your niche so that you can react and update your site content and so make sure you consistently out-rank other people

Use It to Track Your Reputation
I've written before about the importance of maintaining your online reputation.

With the recent advances in social networking online, keeping tabs on what people are saying about you can be time consuming.

Simply having your company name setup within Google alerts means you can be notified any time someone is saying anything about your company. So you can make sure your reputation is as it should be!

Obviously there are other applications as well and in fact of course you will have your own unique requirements to be alerted about.

From speaking to people, I get the impression that surprisingly not everyone is aware of this nifty little tool so I thought I'd share it with you in case it had slipped past your radar.

It's available at http://www.google.com/alerts


Anyway - I'll speak to you again soon with some more tips. Meantime, if you think you'd benefit from some straight advice, just go to http://www.mklink.com/getstarted

'till next time,

Mike Knight. MKLINK Internet Marketing Tips