Online Volleyball Blog

Google offers a free service called Google Alerts.

Essentially this service works by having Google examine their own database for new entries or additions for the keywords or topic you specify. It essentially is a free competitive intelligence service.

Google Alerts has five variations of alerts that they offer: News, Web, Blogs, Groups, and Comprehensive. The categories are pretty self explanatory. I use the comprehensive option.

Here are ways volleyball players can use it:
* Monitor your volleyball club or high school team name. If your team was the “Mighty, Mighty Vballers” you wanted to find out everytime Google finds something new on the net about your team you would direct the alert service to watch various permutations of this keyword. I use quotes around almost everything in my alerts…
“Mighty, Mighty Vballers”
“Mighty Vballers”
“MightyMightyVballers.com”
“www.MightyMightyVballers.com”
“http://www.MightyMightyVballers.com”
* Monitor your competitors.
* Monitor your own name. Be sure to do variations, ie “Kelcie Tankpozik” “Kelc Tankpozik”
* Monitor your favorite players “Misty May”
* Monitor your favorite school “College Name Volleyball”

Be sure to use Boolean logic as appropriate. In example, if you are monitoring something that can be confused, such as “Misty may have said”
use
“Misty May” +volleyball
or
“Misty May” +AVP
or even sometimes you may want to exclude something, like the college where Misty went to school
“Misty May” +volleyball -”Long Beach”

You can select various options as when to receive the alert; I use the once a day choice.

You can also create up to 1,000 alerts.