Let’s take the public Google Alerts account I created for the food author Michael Pollan as an example. These alerts are sent to a Twitter account, and have generated a good list of followers. The auto-twitter page for this account on AlertRank shows you the different ways you can control which alerts are tweeted.

1. Add a hashtag to the end of each tweet to help people find it with a Twitter search tool. You can add as much text as you want here, and AlertRank will automatically trim the alert to make sure the total tweet is within 140 characters.
2. Use the AlertRank quality score to control the importance of the alerts you tweet. The AlertRank score is based on Google PageRank and a collection of other influence factors. The higher the AlertRank, the more influential the source of the alert is.
3. Select the search terms to include in your tweets. You can collect alerts from up to 1,000 search terms in a single AlertRank account, but you can limit the tweets to just the terms you want.
4. Restrict tweets to those alerts with the right page features. For example, if you want to only tweet alerts that allows comments or trackbacks, you can set these options on. That gives you a set of tweets that are suited for a blog outreach campaign.
5. Depending on the amount of alerts you get in your account, you can restrict the number of tweets to a maximum per hour and per day.

The best part is that all of this tweeting is automatic. Since the accounts on AlertRank are free, you can create multiple accounts, each with their own search terms and levels of auto-tweeting control.

We have a lot of improvements planned for AlertRank, and even though it is free, it will continue to grow in response to user requests. So check it out, and let me know if you want anything else added.

We even give you a set of cool badges you can add to your site to show people how to find your alerts. I’ve added my own to this blog’s sidebar.

A public account lets anyone view all your alerts, sources, and analytics pages, but they can’t change any data or delete any alerts. The public account URL is http://www.alertrank.com/public/[username]. Mine is at:
http://www.alertrank.com/public/adam

Public accounts also let your visitors create custom PDF reports from your alerts. I created this PDF report by selecting all the results for the search term Google Alerts over the last 2 days. I also ordered them by the AlertRank quality score to show the most influential results first.

We think that public accounts are a great tool for online PR, SEO and marketing companies to sell their services. You can show a potential client exactly what is being said about them and their competitors on the Web. This really explains the need for an active reputation management program for every organization. It’s the classic case of show rather than tell.

You can set the sentiment value to positive or negative for each alert by clicking in the sentiment column. You can sort on this column, and also select alerts for positive, negative, neutral or all values of sentiment.

The tweets appear with the headline from the Google Alert, and a TinyURL for the alert’s web page. You can also add a set of hashtags to the end of each tweet. For this demonstration I added #test to each message.

Why would you want to auto-tweet your Google Alerts? It is a great way of generating a steady flow of content that will gain you followers interested in specific keywords. As a test of this new feature, I turned on auto-tweeting to an account that is only following 1 person and has no icon, so it’s not a real person. Within 2 hours it got 5 more followers.

Another real benefit of this technique is the added SEO juice this gives your Twitter account. Google is now indexing tweets, and Twitter is making changes to improve the search visibility of their pages. This type of steady stream of content can make your Twitter page authoritative for people searching for your keywords.

We also changed the default display of the sources table to include the number of Delicious links and the top ten Delicious tags for each source.

Clicking an alert to view it’s details will automatically flag it as having been read. You can also mark an alert as read by clicking the checkbox in front of it and then clicking the Mark as Read button. This status can be reversed with the Mark as Unread button.

We also added a shortcut icon to each alert. Just click this icon to open the alert’s Web page in its own tab.

We also changed the alerts display to make it easier to page through all your alerts. AlertRank stores every Google Alert you ever receive permanently, so this feature will be very useful.

The other thing we are working on now is searching though all your stored alerts. Our goal is to make AlertRank a complete Google Alerts database management system.

AlertRank combines all your alerts into a single RSS feed, making it much more convenient to share with others and to read in a feed reader. There is also additional information in the feed content to make it easier to tell which alerts you need to respond to right away.

If you click the link in the feed to ” View additional details,” a page on the AlertRank.com site appears with even more background data on this alert and its source.