One of the most important task for any webmaster is link building for SEO. The incoming links to your website provide relevancy and give you authority in the eyes of the search engines and especially Google. While link building is a tedious process, it is the most important task for website ranking in the SERPS. Without those links ranking is pretty much impossible. And, contrary to popular belief, Page Rank plays a small role in ranks as seen over and over again the SERPS, when PRO sites outrank higher PR sites.

It is important to use free SERP checker SEO tools from time to time for free website analysis, as well as a free backlink checker to monitor the progress of your link building, but as busy as webmasters and bloggers are sometimes it is nice to get email alerts when links to our sites appear on the web.

So,  one of the best free SEO tools to get email alerts when your site has been linked to is Google Alerts.

Also, If you have a blog you know that you get trackbacks, which are alerts, whenever anyone is linking to your site’s content, and that is some of the best information you can get, to see who and what’s being linked to. If both the linker and linkee are using WordPress then the trackback comes to you automatically. However, if the linker blog is not using wordpress, and is using another blogging platform then you may not get the alert, unless the trackback url was specially added and with Blogger, for instance, I do not believe that function even exists. For static websites these auto trackbacks do not exist at all and once again Google Alerts serves a similar function as blog trackbacks.

Also, with Google Alerts you get an idea of how quickly Google crawls and indexes certain sites where you have built links, for example with some social sites I can add a link and then 2 hours later I get a Google Alert, this tells me that that site is favored by Google and is crawled a lot.

Google Alerts provides several parameters and alerts you when:

1. Another site links directly to your website pages and blogs

2. When articles you write get republished on other sites that include backlinks to your sites in the resource box. This is also a great way to make sure that the republishers are following the article republishing rules by keeping your articles and links intact, as they are supposed to.

3. Whenever someone social bookmarks your sites and blogs.

4. Virtually any mention of your website and/or blogs on the web

Set Up a Google Alert:

1. Go to Google Alerts and either log in to to your Google Account or set up an alert directly from the landing page.

2. Search Terms – Add the search terms for your alert, the best option for this is the HOME PAGE URL of your site, or inner page URL’s. Also, you can set up a separate alert for your site name if you want, but then you will get emails when ANY word within your site name appears on the web.

3. Type – Choose COMPREHENSIVE

4. Choose How Often you will receive emails, I choose AS IT HAPPENS.

5. Enter your email address

That’s it, now you will receive email alerts!