Posted by Ray White on January 7, 2010 Comments (1)

Not yet using Google Alerts to keep up with the gossip being spread about you on the web? You really ought to at least know what is being said about you. Here’s how to start using Google Alerts to keep tabs on your brand.

Search terms should begin with your name, business name, and hosted domain name. That should cover all the basics.

Set up an alert for your domain first since that is easiest to do. Go to the Google Alerts form page. To keep track of Soaring4Traffic, I simply type in soaring4traffic.com in the Search terms box on the form. In the Type drop down menu, I select Comprehensive to get alerts when my domain name appears in news articles, webpages, or blog posts. I want to know right away when something new is published, so in the How often box I select as-it-happens from the drop down menu. The Email length box limits the number of results I get per email. I want as much information as I can get, so I choose up to 50 results in that drop down menu. I enter in the Your email box my special email address where I receive only the most important business correspondence. Click the Create Alert button and I’m done! I now receive an email every time Google finds a new instance of my domain in a news article, on a web page, or in a blog post.

Now setting up the alerts for your name and business name is just slightly more involved. You see, when you enter a search term that has more than one word, Google will return results with each word and the whole term. For example, when I search for Ray White, I will get pages that have the word Ray, and pages with the word White, and pages with Ray White, or White Ray, or Ray at the beginning of the first paragraph and White at the end of the second paragraph. I get all kinds of pages that may, but probably don’t, have anything to do with me. Now, if I enter the term “Ray White” with quotation marks, then Google knows to look for, and report back, only the pages that have Ray followed immediately by White. That gives me much more specific results.

There are other tricks for getting more specific results. You can exclude topics, or search specific websites, for example. Google tells you how to do that on their More Search Help page.

If you have not played with Google Alerts yet, give it a try. I bet you will be surprised by what you learn.