Get RSS Feeds For Your Google Alerts

The free google alerts tool is a great way to monitor various aspects of your (or your competitor) websites, news, search results, etc. I’ve got a few setup to monitor new inbound links and for blog posts covering topics I’m interested in. It’s a good way to spot news items and ideas for your blogs. For instance, I’ve got an alert setup to check for references to the popular hill walking destination at Moel Famau (my blog). When someone (typically hill walkers and fell runners) blogs about Moel Famau or it gets mentioned in news items I’m alerted to it and can then choose to publish a blog post for my site as a result. Content is king and all that !

The alerts management system isn’t great because as far as I’m aware you cannot modify the email address to which the alert is sent to. By default they are emailed to the address used in your google account but when you create a new alert you get the chance to specify an email address. I’ve no idea though how you modify the email address on existing alerts.

That’s not a problem now though if you prefer to receive your alerts via an RSS feed! A new option within alerts allows you to create an RSS feed for each alert and automatically subscribe to it in google reader. When you create an alert it’s automatically added to your list of feeds in google reader. Only thing I immediately notice is that you’ll need to rename the subscription to something a little shorter and more meaningful. 

I’ll be editing and creating RSS feeds for all my alerts from now on.

What do you use google alerts for?

Source.

Getting In The Local Business 10 Stack

I’d recommend any local business to make sure they’re listed in Google’s local business centre – I created my own entry sometime ago. I’d not really done much with it but more recently I’ve been tweaking it a little to see if I can listed in the “10 stack” for this search. At time of writing I’m not listed in the 10 stack (I’m about 13th or so), although I have been previously. What I’m interested in is how often the stack is updated – currently one of the 10 listed directs to a sedo parked domain! A couple of the entries look like new businesses to me too.

I need to upload my logo and replace my own mugshot that is currently there.

I’ll have a play and do a little more research in terms of local listing optimisation. I haven’t searched out many blogs on the subject yet. Mike Blumenthals blog looks useful. Any other “local search” blog recommendations?