asked to walk someone through setting up Google Alerts for their business. So I thought I would post to here for everyone to refer back to. If you need help anywhere along the way, let me know by commenting below or by asking me on one of my Social sites.

In your web browsers address bar type in this address: http://www.google.com/alerts
You will get a page that looks like the following:

In the “Search terms” box type in the keywords you want to get alerts on (keywords that you have used in your business, keywords you are using in a marketing campaign, any words you want to get alerts on when they are indexed through Google).

In the drop down box for “Type” select the type of information you want (Blogs, videos, etc). You can do alerts for each one if you want or if you want all of them, select “Everything”.

Decide how many you want per email and select the email address you want them to go to. You can use any email address you have. I use one of my gmail accounts. If you want to use a gmail account and don’t have one, you can get one here.
Click “Create Alert” and you are done.
If you look on the right side where it says “You can also click here to manage your alerts” and click on it, you will go to a page that looks like the following:

Here you can manage all your alerts and you can even add alerts from here. If you notice one of mine says “Feed View in Google Reader” if you want this done and can’t figure it out, I can show you later. You can delete alerts, change your email address and anything else about the alert from here.

Now go set up LOTS of alerts for either your business, your clients OR your competitors.  Google Alerts in ONE way to manage your Online Reputation or someone else’s.

Amongst internet marketers, search engines are generally considered a long-term traffic and marketing strategy, particularly for ad-supported websites or websites designed to promote affiliate offers. While pay-per-click and social media marketing offered short-term success and instant sales, search platforms were generally regarded with a degree of caution, and an equal degree of patience.

Of course, while Facebook advertisements and MySpace banners offer quick traffic and instant monetization, they are by no means the be-all and end-all of online traffic. All major search engines offer their own self-service advertising platforms, giving SEO professionals and search engine marketers a chance to get the best of both worlds when optimizing and promoting their pages for the search engine rankings.

If you are becoming particularly disappointed and annoyed with the slow speed of search engine indexing and page ranking, these short-term search engine marketing solutions could be the solution that you need. While none can get your website to the top of the search engines overnight, all are good for filling in the gaps and quickly monetizing an otherwise unprofitable website.

1) Redirect external links to your new website.

Got some old articles and directory posts sitting around that are not pointing anywhere important? Rather than wasting them on old made-for-Adsense websites or outdated affiliates products, take the smart marketer strategy and use them as an inbound linking resource for your new website. While links can take a while to be indexed, if your linker websites have built a relative degree of authority in the search engines, a single link can often be enough to boost your new page up the ranks.

2) Use search engine PPC platforms to fill in your short-term sales drought.

All major search engines offer a PPC platform, and most smart marketers use it as both a long- and short-term marketing resource. When you are focusing on long-term SEO marketing, it is easy to ignore the possibilities that PPC can open up. Rather than simply waiting for your website to earn money, get out there and proactively promote it with a search engine PPC platform.

3) Use Adwords to boost your page’s value.

Some established SEO experts are now finding shared value between Adwords-advertised websites and Google’s search engine top performers. Whether it is simply a coincidence or something more valuable is unknown, but for a long-term search marketing presence, maybe a short blast of Adwords could be the solution.

4) Build micro-sites to earn while you rank your main website.

Sometimes small websites can rank more quickly than larger ones, especially when it comes to long tail keywords and uncommon search results. While you are building inbound links to your major website, consider hosting some smaller websites to earn from long tail keywords and incoming search results in the meantime.

5) Ask search consultants to work with you for quicker rankings.

Some SEO consultants are true miracle machines, able to make rankings appear out of thin air and turn unprofitable sites into cash cows overnight. However, they are almost always outweighed by shifty search engine firms and outright scammy consultants. Before you invest in a search engine consultant, make sure they are worth the time and money. A good SEO can really help you, but it could take work to find them.

Before you can understand how social bookmarking affects your SEO rankings you need to know a little about both. Together they are a crucial part of your web product or service.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is basically saving the web sites (addresses) to a networking site. Because thousands of people do this, there are a lot of sites that certain groups seem to like more than others.

For instance, go to one of the social bookmarking sites and sign up (many are free to register), and bookmark your web page on the site. When you bookmark the site to your favorites you will then be asked to supply a tag and a title for the bookmark. The title will be what the site is about and the tag will be what search terms people would use to find the site.

When someone else goes online and searches using one of the tags you have supplied, your bookmarked site shows up in the results. People believe that when other people bookmark a site, it is something interesting. So they will go to the site to see what it is about and if they like the site, they will bookmark it. When they do this it gives the site more popularity. When enough people bookmark the site, it will go up in search engine rankings.

Eventually all these people bookmarking your site will cause it to be ranked at the top of the search engines. When bookmarking a site on a social network, all you have to do to see your bookmarks is sign into your account on the social bookmarking site.

This can be done from any computer that has Internet accessibility. It is not the same as bookmarking on your computer. The bookmarking that you do while on your computer using your browser is just saved to the computer’s hard drive. It cannot be accessed by anyone but you or someone who has access to your computer.

SEO

SEO is another story. The SEO (search engine optimization) is used for watching what people are searching for and how they look up the information. Today with the huge amount of advertising and sales that occur online, the need to have your business in the top of the search engines is paramount. The only way you are going to generate the traffic you need is by being ranked high in the search engines.

Therefore people are always trying to figure out the right combination that will allow them to be in the top. They hire companies to do this for them. The secret to making it to the top of the search engines is the keywords you use. They must be the very best ones for your service or product in order for your site to show up in the top search results when someone is looking for what you are promoting.

If not, you will be ranked back on one of the search engine results pages (SERPS) that no one ever sees. Most people choose from the first page of results when searching for a particular item. Sometimes they may go to the second page, but not often.

How the Two Go Together

If you have an online business you will find one of the most important things is where your business ranks on the Internet. The higher it ranks the more traffic you will get and this leads to sales. The keywords you choose are going to be key factors when it comes to getting the traffic you need to survive.

When using keyword phrases the words that are typed into the search engines are often going to be a combination of words. This is a keyword phrase which includes two or more words. Using a keyword phrase is recommended however just a single word can be used. If so, the word must be extremely relevant to the business or product being searched.

With the huge amount of online advertising and sales today, the business that has the best standing online will be the one with the highest ranking on the search engines. When your website is ranked in the top spots on the search engines, the result will be higher traffic targeted to your specific product. This will ensure that the profitability of your business.