From the category archives:

SEO

Auto-tweeting of Google Alerts has become one of the most popular features in AlertRank, and now that AlertRank accounts are free these auto-tweets are popping up everywhere. We’ve added lots of controls that let you fine tune your auto-tweeting, and I wanted to point these out.

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.

auto-tweet

  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.

Related Posts

{ 3 comments }

It’s funny how users interpret the behavior of software. I sometimes see complaints on Twitter that Google Alerts are way too slow.

alertspeed1

I also see people who are amazed at how fast it is.

alertspeed3

But it is the same software. Could the problem lie somewhere else? Here is a clue.

alertspeed4

That’s right. Google Alerts are a measurement of when Google indexes a site. I know people think that Google is God, and that it knows about all pages the instant they are created, if not earlier. The reality is that some sites are indexed faster than others. The difference is based on the quality of the site’s SEO.

Instead of complaining about Google, which is about as useful as complaining about the weather, you should start improving the SEO of your site, and use the speed of Google’s response to tell you how well you are doing with that job.

All you have to do is setup a Google Alert for your site, and see how long it takes for new pages to be indexed. This is done with the search term:
site:yoururl.com

Related Posts

{ 1 comment }

Show clients why they must manage their online reputation

May 5, 2009

We just updated AlertRank to allow public accounts. This makes it a snap to share all your Google Alerts in a complete management interface with custom reporting. All you have to do is open the Alert Management tab, select the Public Account page, and click the check box to make your account public.

We even give [...]

Read the full article →

Google owns your reputation, and you must optimize it

May 3, 2009

I read a lot about Search Engine Optimization, and I keep seeing people make the same mistake. They view Google as a search engine, when it is really a reputation engine. When someone searches for a set of keywords, the implicit request is not “Show me something that matches these words.” They are asking for [...]

Read the full article →

5 Google Alerts tricks every webmaster must use

April 12, 2009

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 [...]

Read the full article →