Google Alerts are the latest and greatest way to follow your websites publicity as well as a useful tool to track your competitors movements. With Google Alerts, you simply put a tracking device on a certain word and each time that word is found by Google on the Internet, you receive an email. I’ve been using Google Alerts for a long time now and can honestly say that it’s an incredible idea and one of the most useful tools on the Internet. It doesn’t suprise me that Google came up with it. The tool is still in beta phase, so we can only hope, even though it’s hard to imagine, that the system will get even more useful.

The first step is to setup an alert, which takes a matter of seconds. There are only four fields:

• The search term you are interested in being alerted about
• Type: Comprehensive, Blogs, Web, Video, Groups and News
• Frequency: As it happens, Once a day, Once a week
• Your email address to which the alert will be emailed

Once you have created the alert, you will be taken through to your alert management page, which really doesn’t need any explanation as it’s 100% straight forward. All the options you will need are visible on the dashboard, it’s honestly fool proof!

When Google finds your search term, it will send you an email from the source, allowing you to go and have a look. The example shows that one of my search terms is ‘imod’ and it shows where on the Internet the word was found.

It’s as simple as that, yet so darn powerful if you think about it! It’s like stalking your competitors and making sure that where they are being spoken about, that you get presence there too!