When you have done implementing your web site/application, you should consider monitoring its presence in the search engines. By knowing where your work appears or being proposed/discussed/advertised, you have a clear view of its influence to on-line communities and possible customers or visitors.
This is a very good reason to use the alert facilities developed by the major search engines. In this post I’ll write about the alerts provided by Google and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
First go to Yahoo! Alerts and log in with your account (or create a new if you don’t have one). Select “Most popular alerts” from the right sidebar and press “News”. Then check “Keyword News” (if not already checked) and press “Set Up Alerts”. Write into “Include:” textbox your web site’s name or URL and make sure that “Deliver to: Email” is checked. Then click again “Set Up Alerts” and repeat the procedure if you want more alerts. Finally click on “Done” to confirm and check what you’ve done.
Google
First go to Google Alerts and log in with your account (or create a new if you don’t have one). Insert you web site’s name or URL into “Search terms” textbox, select the appropriate values for the listboxes and click “Create Alert”.
And a useful tip (and a smart move for SEO) for the end of this post.
You can create an alert including your desired keywords (for which you want to rank high in search engines) with the addition of your web site’s name excluded, i.e. preceded by a minus sign like: “-websitename”. With this technique you can monitor for web pages relevant to yours but not mentioning yours!
For example, let’s say your site’s URL includes the word “helkin” [shameless plug to one of my sites about Greek cinema :-)] and you want to rank high with keywords “Greek cinema”. Using the tip above, you should create an alert to monitor for pages using the query: “greek cinema -helkin” (without the double quotes).
The SEO comes when you can add your URL, either as a new catalog entry (if the found page is a catalog) or a blog comment (if it’s a blog), for every new catalog or blog found about Greek cinema! Talking about self-promoting…
Visit The Light of the LAMP blog for more…