Both Google News and Google Alerts let you keep track of the latest news by keywords.

A lot of people simply stick their favorite keywords into Google Alerts and ignore that feature in Google News. However, there’s a better way.

Use Google Alerts for keywords that you really want to keep track of on a constant basis. Since the alerts are emailed to you, you can always file the emails away under a “To Read” tag and catch up when you have time later without fearing you’ll miss anything.

However, there may be topics that interest you, but you don’t necessarily need to read every story that’s published about them. These keywords are better entered as Google News keywords, so you can peruse the latest stories when you launch Google News, but you won’t miss them if you don’t have the time — and your important alerts won’t be lost in the shuffle.

For example, I keep Google News alerts on general topics like “animal welfare” and “reproductive rights” but I keep Google Alerts on “assault weapons ban” and “misandry” because I want to be able to act on/respond to articles on the latter topics more often than the former.

The best gauge for whether something should be in Google News or Google Alerts is to set everything up as a Google Alert on a daily basis first. If a topic starts to come up so often that it annoys you, move it to once a week. If you’re still not reading your alerts, move it to Google News.