Have you thought about it? Google Alerts is popularly known to be a method of keeping in touch with latest content on the worldwide web regarding a topic that you are interested in. The other side of the story is, it can be effectively used as a method of targeting relevant audiences for the content on your website.

Currently there are six types of alerts available, namely News, Blogs, Video, Discussions, Realtime and Everything. To start optimizing your site for Google alerts, you need to decide in which specific category your site will fall into. If yours is a news website like a local newspaper, chances are your site getting alerted under "News Alerts" is high. I make an assumption, most of you who are reading this post are bloggers, trying to drive more relevant traffic for your blog. You might already using Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and Social Media Marketing on Facebook and Twitter to drive more traffic for your blog. I suggest you to start actively using Google Alerts to drive more traffic to your blog. The trick with GAO is very simple. Every time you post an article on your website with a selectively optimized keyword (phrase), Google will send an automated alert to people who subscribed to Google Alerts for that keyword. The person subscribed to the alert, because the keyword is relevant for him. If your post is relevant for the keyword too, Google Alerts will connect your site to this highly relevant reader of your blog. How this is different from Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? We all know, if you are not within the top 10 results for a given keyword, you don't exist on SEO spectrum. 89% of people will click on links within the first 10 results of a SERP. Then we all know how hard it is to get to the top 10 results of a SERP, using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Once someone get into the top 10, it is very hard for others to compete and dislodge that position. But with GAO, everyone is having equal chances of getting into the inbox of relevant readers once in a while. Google Alerts is time specific, so if you post something relevant to "Search Engine Optimization" or "SEO" today; you have a better chance of getting into the inboxes of people who have created Google Alerts for those phrases. (But we all know that it is almost impossible for someone to overnight dislodge one of the top 10 sites on Google SERP for the same keywords)

What does Google Alerts do?

Imagine you are a cricket fan and you want to get the latest news about Cricket World Cup 2011. All you have to do is, go to google.com/alerts and creating an alert for "Cricket World Cup 2011".

How Do I Get to the Top of the Link List on Google Alerts Email?

There is no clear evidence of how Google ranks the links on an alerts email, but we have enough reasons to believe that they use the same algorithm as for ranking web pages for Google Search. That is to say, that you need to concentrate on keyword density in the post, plus the number of backlinks to the article with relevant anchor texts.