Dave,

This is the way I use it, and I guess Terry uses it the same way.

Say you upload an article. you go to google alerts and create a new alert with a string of text from your article. Whenever google finally crawls your article. it will realize that's waht you want to be alerted about, and send you an email. It's used to keep up with trends, but you can use it to know when a page or article of yours has been crawled (and hopefully soon will be indexed)

You can also use it to see when your backlinks were crawled. The way I've done it was to publish urls to all my backlinks on one simple html page. Then I gave that page some text as well and told google alerts to alert me about a string of text (from my simple html page) so when google finally crawled that page, it also sent me an email telling me about that page.

You can use any of the Google operators such as link:domainname.com, site:domainname.com etc to alert you about anything you want to know. Its been a while since I updated my alerts, but each time Google adds a backlink, I know baout it straightaway....its pretty handy!

I also use google alerts to flag any new links added for my main keyword phrases.. as well as using google alerts (rss feed option) to feed content to my twitter account.