I stumbled upon this great article on 10 tips for building links and SEO using Google Alerts. These are some pretty good ideas! seospring.com/2007/10-google-alerts-secrets-for-link-building-seo/ Also to build links we use PRBlogNet.com that gives us direct access to PR5 to PR7 blogs for making our own posts and creating keyword anchor links to our sites.
I have Google Alerts set up to notify whenever a new keyword of mine is found but I don't really use it.
Hey Gatorade; Try using alerts for 'blog search' with your keywords. It lets you know when anyone writes about your keywords, so you can go to their site and comment to get a link, as well as gives you stuff to write about. SOme of the other methods mentioned have made me addicted to G Alerts.