Add this phenomenal power tool to your daily delivery of Google news/update email alerts - then just stand back and watch it fly. Alert Rank immediately goes to work gathering, sorting, and annotating for you.
All you have to do is review the neat, easy-to-read reports as they arrive.
It couldn't be simpler!
For total control over your Google Alerts you need to learn how to use search operators. These are special terms that tell Google where and how to search. They can be combined with normal keywords to give your alerts laser-like focus and superhuman powers. Well, not quite, but they are very cool.
The intitle: operator will increase the relevance of your results by letting you search for your keywords in the titles of pages. Don't leave any spaces between the operator and your keyword:
intitle:pizza
You can combine any search operator with other keywords. In this example pizza needs to be in the title, but delivery can be anywhere. Individual keywords can come before or after the operator:
delivery intitle:pizza
You can also use negative keywords with operators:
-dominos intitle:pizza
The allintitle: operator will let you search for a series of keywords anywhere in the title. You just have to put the series of words in quotes:
allintitle:"pizza beer wine"
The title will tell you the subject of a page, but the URL is more likely to tell you its function. For example, a restaurant may have pizza on lots of its pages, but only put the word menu into the single page on the site with menu details. This means that inurl: operator will let you get even more specific. You can use this with or without other operators or keywords:
inurl:menu
pizza inurl:menu
intitle:pizza inurl:menu
You can expand the URL search with the allinurl: operator, which lets you search for multiple words at one time. All of the words must be in quotes with spaces between them:
allinurl:"pizza menu"
The site: operator seems like inurl: at first, but the difference is important. Inurl: searches within a URL. Site: searches starting at the beginning of the URL. For example, inurl:pizza will find any page with pizza anywhere in its URL. Site:pizza, on the other hand, doesn't find anything, because it wasn't given a complete URL. If you search for site:pizza.com, you will only find pages on this domain. An alert with this search will notify you when a new page is added to this site. You can also combine this operator with other keywords to get an alert for any new page on a specific site with those words:
video site:pizza.com
Another use of site: is to find any page from sites in a specific Top Level Domain (TLD). A TLD is the part of a URL after the final dot. For example, you can find pages from educational institutions with site:edu. Note that you don't put a dot in front of edu. If you combine this with a keyword, you can be notified whenever there is a pizza party in any institution of higher learning:
pizza party site:edu
The other operator you should incorporate into your Google Alerts is link:. This is used with a complete URL, and will find any page that has a link to that URL. In effect it is the opposite of site:. Site: can tell you about a page on pizza.com, while link: can tell you about any page that links to pizza.com:
link:pizza.com
If you are responsible for tracking inbound links for your site, you should definitely have a Google Alert for your URL with the link: operator.
One problem with link: is that it reports on links within the site as well. So it will alert you whenever a new page on that site has a link to another page on the site. This can be blocked by using -site: with the same URL. This search only sends alerts when a new link is made from outside of the site:
link:pizza.com -site:pizza.com
