One of the most time consuming aspects of SEO is link prospecting, trawling through blog after blog for suitable link partners is boring and there can be times when hours of work yield very little. But don’t get disheartened, Google’s Alerts service can be easily re purposed to do a lot of the leg work for you.

Imagine your doing SEO for the keywords “green widgets”, Google Alerts allows you to set up automated emails telling you when new content is indexed that relates to your chosen keywords, so every time anyone publishes content about “green widgets” you get to know about it.

You can set up alerts on content from websites, news, news, books and discussions, you can also choose how often you want alerts, from as-it-happens to weekly. I would suggest you start with daily unless you want a very full inbox.

The quality of the leads this generates isn’t guaranteed, you still have to sort the wheat from the chaff and you still have to persuade people to give you links. But the content you get alerted to is fresh, if news breaks that is relevant to one of your keywords you’ll know about it and even if you can’t always get a link you’ll be able to publish your own content and keep your site fresh.

Google Alerts is here:
http://www.google.com/alerts

It’s quick and intuitive so I won’t explain how to do it here, you’ll figure it out.

One last tip though, if you set up daily alerts for more than a few keywords you’ll want to set up filters in your email to put the alerts into a folder. If you’re working on keywords for more than a couple of sites you’ll also want to divide up the incoming emails that way too.