Our topic today is Google Alerts.

If you google a lot like we do in our business then you will eventually tire of typing in the same search terms day after day.

Whether you are checking up on your competitors in your chosen field,niche or practice or just wanting to learn a lot about a particular subject this google tool is brilliant.

I will give you a practical example, last week our team were working on a very large adsense site for a client in the boating industry.

We like to gain a detailed understanding of an industry when working on projects in that field so we simply signed up to get emails sent to our inbox, the inbox we had registered particularly for this project our boating inbox.

We simply entered the terms that we wanted to get FREE alerts on, boating,sailing,sailing lessons etc.and our inbox started to fill with alerts.

Stop and think for a moment about the applications this has.

Alerts can provide you with articles about your niche,information on releases or advertisements your competitors are running and much much more.

In our example above we were using a website builder program to put the website together and it is a terrific tool but we wanted a deeper understanding of the keywords this program was giving us to use .

You can choose to receive alerts as often as you like or in a batch weekly.

To sign up to get google alerts simply enter the search term or phrase you wish to monitor which can even include a person a company or thing, then simply go to www.google.com/alerts/

and register.

To complete your search query at the google alerts page simply enter your term into the google search terms box and then do the following.

1.pull down the type of search box and pick your choice of search, news, web,groups or news and web.

2.Pull down the how often list and select how often you want the email alerts to come.

3.Finish by simply clicking on the create Alert button .

I would recommend getting a gmail account as the alerts will be sent straight there or you will need to specify the email address you wish to get the emails sent to.

The other terrific thing about gmail that I will cover in another article is the amount of memory you get it’s huge so you can get a lot of incoming alerts and just tag and group them by subject if like us you are working on a number of projects at once.

If you do choose to set up a google account you can customize your alerts by signing into your account and accessing your google alerts page where you can modify all of the search criteria at any time you wish.

To cancel a google Alert simply click on the cancellation link at the bottom of any google alert that you receive.

It doesn’t matter what you are searching for this tool will keep you completely up to date at a time you choose.