I hope you know about and are using Google Alerts – it’s a nice way to get info delivered to your email inbox or RSS reader for specific search terms you want to monitor.

But, you can also use a number of the Google shortcuts and search parameters to create some interesting alerts.

For instance, let’s say you want to create an alert for anytime that Google picks up on someone linking to your blog. On top of being a potentially nice monitoring feature it’s also a great networking tactic. If someone is reading and linking to your blog, you might want to comment back.

For this kind of alert go to Google Alerts and put this in the search term box – link:http://www.yourblogurl.com (yourblogurl is of course the address of your blog). In the “type” box, choose comprehensive or just blog if you only want blog links. You can also select daily, weekly and as-it-happens delivery.

This is yet another one of those things you should be paying attention to and the more you can automate it the better.

You might want to revisit my Top 10 Google Shortcuts to find some more ways to track