How Google Alerts Work (from an seo standpoint)
July 25, 2008
Google takes your alert terms and monitors the first 20 (or so) pages of it’s search engine results and sends you an alert when one of those websites are updated with new content.
If you are closely monitoring your competition, a google alert is a great tool to inform you that your competitor has made changes that may or may not affect their serp (relevant to the keywords you want to emphasize).
It also might not be a bad idea to more frequently update pages from your site that do rank higher for certain search terms. This way any of your clients (or potential clients) may receive alerts from your site more often. Of course, the caveat is that your competition may also receive them as well!
July 25, 2008 at 10:13 pm
I’ve seen this “Google Alert” link on my Google blog searches, but I never thought of it as THAT useful, but maybe you’re right. Great idea! For me it’s not just about competition, but also an easy way to find blogs with the same topic as mine, on which I then can comment (or not) and thus drive traffic (or not) to my own blog.
August 4, 2008 at 3:30 am
very informative