This is a simply brilliant idea from Trafficology.com. This month Trafficology reports on a new way to use Google Web Alerts that is almost guaranteed to increase your page rank.

Web Alerts is a free service by Google that will automatically send you an email when someone new links to your site.

Chris suggests that Getting free email alerts when someone links to you is pretty cool, but it's even more useful if you get alerted when someone links to a competitors site. You can use this information to your advantage by immediately approaching the site that linked to your competitor and asking if they'll link to you too. The likely hood of successfully getting the link is many times higher than standard link building because the prospect is both fresh and already interested in linking to a site similar to yours. All it takes is a quick email saying... 'Hey John, I noticed you just linked to XYZ.com. I'm from ABC.com and we sell widgets too, I added a link from my site to yours and would appreciate it if you added a link back to my site.'

Why should you do this... We'll if you did not already know linking and link popularity are major factors in the search engine rankings. In fact, Google's PageRank or PR is basically a measure of the quality and the quantity of links to your site.

Whenever I click on the "Web Alerts" link, the page comes up, but nothing is on it and nothing loads.
Any suggestions?

Thanks.