Randy Young on Twitter just asked me how he can track his website on Google Alerts. Great question, Randy. Here are some alerts every webmaster should have active.
1. Your most important keywords. What words do you want people to be able to find you with on Google? You’ll get a much better idea of how other sites are using these words, if you get a steady stream of alerts. When you do get alerts for keywords you consider important to your business, go to that page and use your browser to view the page source. How are these words used in the title, meta description, and meta keywords tags? You can learn a lot about SEO by studying those competitors who do it well.
2. Which of your pages does Google add to its index? This is done with an alert for site:yourdomain.com.
3. Which sites are linking to you? This can be done with link:yourdomain.com -site:yourdomain.com. You can do the same with your major competitors. If someone links to a competitor, contact them about linking to you as well.
4. Which sites does Google think are similar to yours based on keywords and links? You can follow this with the related: operator, as follows, related:yourdomain.com. Again, run this alert for competing sites also.
5. The name of your web host. It’s always good to know if people are complaining about the company that is managing your webserver.
Do you have any Google Alerts questions you need answered?
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