Advanced Link Manager User Guide

Chapter 2. Step-by-Step Tutorials

When launching Advanced Link Manager for the first time, its features, settings and capabilities may seem a little overwhelming. That is why we have created this tutorial, an intuitive, concise but, nevertheless, comprehensive manual which is intended to ease you in, to help you quickly get started on monitoring web pages that link to you in one or multiple search engines, according to your preferences. As a user, you will be given a wide range of possibilities, as Advanced Link Manager can easily be adjusted to your particular needs, without its precision and transparency being affected.

The tutorial requires some interaction between you and the application. However, this may not be always possible at the same time you are reading the tutorial. You can either switch between the Help tab and the application, or you can download the PDF version of this user guide and follow it from there. You can also print the page you are interested in from the PDF document. Please visit our website download page for the PDF version of this manual:

http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com/download.html

Getting Started

1. Creating an Advanced Link Manager New Project

Creating a new Advanced Link Manager project involves having a clear image of its utility and functionality on the part of the user. Therefore, you first need to know the exact domain of the website you are interested in. As an example, we have chosen for this tutorial the news service field as the starting point.

Go to [Project] -> [New Project] and the "New Project Wizard" dialog will pop up displaying the "Domain Setup" screen. Here we'll type in "www.bbc.com" as being "our" site (which we'll refer to here as target domain). It is its link popularity we want to monitor.

Now let's choose some search engines. Click the [Next >>] button to proceed to the "Search Engine Setup" screen.

For this tutorial we will pick Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines as they are three of the major ones. These are the search engines we'll use to find web pages that link to our website.

Here we'll refer to these web pages pointing to us as "referrer URLs" or "referrers".

Click the [Next >>] button to proceed to the last screen in "New Project Wizard". Now all we have to do is decide what to do next with our project.

There are three options available:

  • Update the project now - Choose this option if you want to bring the project up to date or - in other words - run an update right after the project has been created.

  • Postpone the update - Choose this option if you don't want to run an update after the project has been created. Please note that your project contains no information right after it has been created.

  • Setup additional options - Choose this option if you want to proceed with a more detailed setup of our project before you run the update. You can do this at any later time through the [Project] -> [Project Settings] menu item.

Now let's say we chose to postpone the update.

Click on the [Finish] button to complete "New Project Wizard" and load the project in Advanced Link Manager. Our project has been successfully created, but for the moment though, it contains no information. In order to gather some data, we need to bring the project up to date.

2. Updating an Advanced Link Manager Project

To update the current project go to [Update] -> [Start] menu item. The "Update" dialog will pop up.

We'll get into more details about what this dialog does later. For now, just click the [Start] button to start the update.

The update consists in two steps:

  • First it will look for pages (in each of the search engines from your project) that contain a link to our website, excluding our own website.

    A "Progress" tab will show up, where we can follow the update's progress.

  • Next it will check whether the web pages found are actually linking to our website.

Once the update is complete you can see all the information gathered by the update in the Interactive Reports

3. Checking the quality and the number of our referrers

Now we can finally check our website's referrers and how well they are ranked in the search engines. These are web sites that may be referring traffic to us.

Click on the Referrers tab and select "www.bbc.com" domain in the left side panel to see our referrers rankings, IP address and update related information. Being linked to from web pages with high ranking and from different IP addresses means we have powerful "votes" that will increase our relevance in the search engines results.

Click on the Referrer Evolution tab to see the number of links pointing to us for each referrer and it's evolution over time. We can easily figure out whether our efforts to increase our link popularity have proven to be successful from this view.

The Referrer Evolution report shows the evolution in time of the number of links pointing to us from our referrer(s) (which are also known as backlinks). Please note that at least two consecutive updates are necessary to render a meaningful graph.

4. Monitoring our competition

Now let's say we also want to monitor some other major players. Let's go to [Project] -> [Project Settings] and the Project Settings dialog will pop up with the "Domains" tab selected by default.

For this tutorial we have chosen to add two more websites to the target domains: "www.cnn.com" and "news.google.com"

Click on the [OK] button to complete the project setup. Now, you have added the competition's domains in your project, but you currently have no data gathered for these new domains. So you need to update the project using the "Start update" icon from the toolbar. This second update will only update the data for the two new domains we just added. When the update is complete, we can monitor the referrers of both our site and our competitors' sites on the chart views and reports.

Easy enough? Try the Basic Tutorial to learn how to deal with more complex projects!