By Rich Whittle and Tim Kerber

Easily Keep Up To Date On The Latest Information

One of the biggest problems facing webmasters is keeping their sites interesting so visitors will keep coming back. That means new content and lots of it.

Google has launched a new service that is a blessing to webmasters. It makes it much easier to keep up with the latest trends.

This service automatically sends emails to you when there's news about a topic of interest to you. You specify keywords likely to appear in articles about your topic and Google finds and delivers the news to you.

The signup box is simple and looks like this:

Google News Alert

It's a FREE service and you don't even have to register to use it.

• Go to the Google News Alerts page
• Enter a topic you're interested in
• The frequency with which you'd like to receive your alerts and
• Your email address

Google sends you a confirmation email that contains a link to activate your alert. Once you've confirmed your request they'll begin checking for news to send to you.

When signing up, you have the option of receiving email alerts either once a day or as it happens. With the "once a day" option, Google will check for new stories once a day, meaning you'll get at max one email per day.

If you select "as it happens," they'll check for news continuously throughout the day. If your topic is one that's the subject of a lot of news coverage, you could get several alerts in a given day. I recommend the 'once a day' option. This keeps each day's alerts in one email.

Applying This With Your Website

How is this going to provide content for your web site?

As an example, if your web site is about online auctions, you could set up an alert for 'ebay'. This would send you news articles about the ebay auction site as they occur each day.

Then you'll get emails with story summaries and links to news stories. You set up a news section on your web site and put these summaries and links there. You can't put the full news story on your web site (that would be copyright infringement), but you can put up a summary and a link (fair use).

If you set up several alerts based on keywords about your web site, you'll be suprised at the amount of new content you'll get.

It is another example of a free simple tool that google has made available to make your life a little easier. (When are they going public with their stock offering anyway?!?)