4. Find and enter details of potential link partners

Once Link Exchange Manager has been set up with your website details, a template of your website's layout, and all the categories have been set up, you will then be ready to start exchanging links with other websites.

How do I go about finding quality links page content for my links pages?

There are a number of ways you can go about doing this. If you already receive link exchange requests from other people then it is very simple to add these to your database. Normally they will provide you with a Site Title, Website URL, Website Description, and often they will tell you where on their site they have (or will) put your reciprocal link.

We firstly recommend downloading and installing the Google Toolbar.

It is a great toolbar for your web browser to view the page rank of each page on the internet. Each page on the internet is given a rating out of 10, the higher a page/website linking back to you, the more important it is regarded by search engines. When you are reviewing websites to exchange links with, it is a good idea to check their ranking to determine whether they are worth swapping links with. Not only should you look at their homepage rating, you should more importantly check out the webpage (their links page) that will contain your reciprocal link. If their rank rating is low then it may not be worth linking to at this time. Any page with a page rank of 4 or more is generally regarded as a quality page and will benefit you if they link to you from it. Any with a rank of 2 or below will not help you much at all.

As a general rule of thumb, the more websites linking back to you, the more important your website will be regarded by search engines. It is also important to note that one link to you from a website page with a high rating will benefit you more than 50 links from low ranking sites.

Entering Other Site's Link Details

From the main menu of Link Exchange Manager, select your website from the list and press the "Enter Links Page" button.
You will then be presented with the following Reciprocal Links screen.

To Enter a website's reciprocal link details, press the "Add" Button.
This will enable the data entry fields and clear them if another record was previously displayed. The fields for making the reciprocal link are Site Title, Site Description, Site URL. If you know the location on their website where your link will be located, enter it into the My Link Location field. Each time when you check for your reciprocal link it will search that page for your homepage link which you had defined when setting up your own site details.
If you know the email address of your link partner then you should also include it in the Email field as you can only send reciprocal link requests to people who you have entered a valid email for. However, for link partners who send you a reciprocal link request instead, it is not that crucial to include their email address as they have already contacted you first.

You are required to allocate categories to all your reciprocal link records in the database. If your links pages are set up for multiple links, then you will be required to select both a main category and sub category for each links record. This can be done through the "Select Category" button.

The "Include in HTML Links Page" checkbox allows you to enable/disable the record. If it is checked then it will appear in your links pages when they get generated. By default, they will be active when you create a new links record.

When you have finished entering each record you must save it using the Update Changes button. Failure to update changes will effectively mean you are aborting any changes made to the current/new record.

5. Automatically check link partners sites for your link

Link Exchange Manager can automatically check for your link on link partners websites. If you know your link partner's links page URL when you enter their site details into the program, you can specify where you want Link Exchange Manager to look for it each time it checks for your links. If you don't know their links page URL then you can wait for them to reply back to your link exchange requests before entering it in. If they don't reply back then it is unlikely that they would have added you.
The good thing about this feature is it can check for dead links, and lets you know if a former link partner has removed your link from their website.

It is important to run the Check Links feature before sending an email for any new link exchange requests. This step is important to ensure that you do not accidentally send a link request to someone who has already added you to their website (ie someone who initially sent you a link exchange request). It also adds an extra check to make sure you don't send a second link exchange request to someone who has added your URL to their website after receiving your first email.

To automatically check for your link on all of your link partners websites, simple press the "Check Links" button - (see the screen image above).

The Check Links feature returns the following status codes:

- SUCCESS	Your link was found on link partner's specified links page
- LINK NOT FOUND	Partner's links page was found but your link was not on it
- NOT FOUND	Usually this means the website was not found or accessible
- PAGE NOT FOUND	The links page specified was not found on their site (404 Error)
- MY LINK NULL	You have not specified a links page URL to search
- FRAMES USED??	This code means Link Exchange Manager did not find your return link but it found their website uses frames. It is possible that your link may be burried deep in a framed page. It is our advice that you advoid exchanging links with sites who use frames as framed pages are hard for search engines to find therefore swapping links with them is of no real value to you. We have seen some situations where someone's top level frame page has a high pagerank but when we tested the rank of their actual framed page where they had links located, the rank of the underlying page was a useless 0.

When you run the check links feature, it also checks for the Alexa traffic ranking of all your link partners websites. Traffic rank tells you what place a website is ranked in relation to all other websites over a 3 month period. This is calculated at domain level.
For example, say a website has a rank of 40,000. It is in 40,000th position out of all other websites on the internet in regards to the number of visitors it receives. There are about 40,000 other websites which receive more traffic, while all other websites have had less visitors over the last 3 month period. Learn more about Alexa Traffic Rank.

This is a useful statistic as the lower the number, the more important the website will generally be. You will quickly know which link partners are most important, while you may want to reject link partners who are poorly ranked.

6. Send Link Request Emails to link prospects

If you plan to actively finding link exchange partners instead of waiting for them to find you then you will need to send link exchange request emails to prospects who you find. We suggest one way to begin searching for link partners is to look on other websites and look at their links pages. It is quite likely that other companies who already have a links page will be willing to swap links with you. These sites may already have a good search ranking if they already have been exchanging links with others.

Setting up your custom email

The first step for sending out your link exchange requests is to ensure your custom emails are set up correctly. From the main menu, select the "Configure Emails" button. You will be presented with the following screen where you may customize your email requests.

Here we have provided sample emails for sending your first and second link exchange requests. It allows you to customize it with your own text as well, it allows you to insert bookmark codes into the email text to represent field data from your database. This is useful for providing link exchange prospects with your website's descriptions and URLs.

Sending a single link request to a link exchange prospect

You can send link exchange requests to prospects one at a time as you are adding them to your database, or later as a batch.
To send a single email requesting a link exchange from one particular prospect, enter their website details, email address, etc into Link Exchange Manager then update the record. Then press the "Email Prospect" button which is in the bottom left position of the data entry window (don't mistake it for the "Email Prospects" button in the left menu).
The following screen should then be displayed. Simply select the first email request item and press Send.

Sending link requests emails to multiple prospects at once

Before sending link request emails to prospects already added to the system, it is recommended you run the "Check Links" feature to check the status of their reciprocal links back to your website.

When sending your link request emails to multiple potential link partners at the same time, Link Exchange Manager is very intelligent at deciding who it will be sent to and who not to send them to. It keeps note and will take into account the following :

- Has the first email request already been sent to prospect?
- Are they already a successful link partner with a current link to your site?
- If it is a new prospect, it checks to see if we have checked their link status yet.
- If sending the second link request, when was the first link request sent?

By selecting the email type option box, Link Exchange Manager will automatically display in the list all the websites who are set up and due to receive that particular email request.

If a link prospect replies and has agreed to place a link back, go to their record in Link Exchange Manager and make sure you have entered their link location URL where they have placed your link. Normally they will tell you the URL of the page that they put it on. This will allow you to continue checking for your link in the future. If they remove your link at a later time, Link Exchange Manager will tell you.