Advanced Link Manager

Today, we’re reviewing Advanced Link Manager v7.1 build 6 from the team at Caphyon Ltd.  We’ll also take a look at Caphyon’s Advanced Web Ranking software tool.

As you are well aware by now, I write software …

I also create web sites.

Now, I was searching Google for something better to help me keep track of my link-backs.  Currently, I use a purpose written database that I created many years ago, and has done the job admirably … to a point.

My database does the basics, and it makes things easier than doing everything manually, but it’s not all that sophisticated.  So, I was searching for a sophisticated link manager program to help organise the chaos that can be tracking links to your site.  You know the problem … you’ve created a web site and you are performing the normal SEO tasks to get more exposure for your site.  One of the key tasks to perform is to get back-links to your site from other relevant sites on the web to increase your link popularity.

So, what’s so hard about that I hear you ask ? Well, you are right, it doesn’t have to be … it’s fine to do the basics yourself :

1. Find links back to your site and enter them into a spreadsheet or database
2. Evaluate the quality of the site linking to you
3. Find relevant sites that you want to exchange links with
4. Ensure that those sites are high quality and that they really are relevant to your site
5. Find a contact email address for the owner of the site you want to link with
6. Email the owner of the site
7. Record the URL, contact details, and the date you tried to contact them
8. Keep a record of the email you actually sent them so that you can refer to it later
9. Wait for a reply from the owner of the other site
10. Manually create a link to their site when you get affirmative replies
11. Periodically verify that their link to your site still exists
12. Repeat for every single link you want to create to your site

Hang on a second … that really is hard !!

That’s quite a lot of work, which needs to be repeated on a regular basis and has quite a bit of information to keep track of. Surely someone has written some quality software to make all of that much, much easier …

Of course they have !! The team at Caphyon have written Advanced Link Manager to do all of that and much more.  Let’s take a closer look at Advanced Link Manager, what it offers, and how you can use it to build your web site’s link popularity.

Advanced Link Manager

Advanced Link Manager

When I stumbled across the web site for this piece of software, it looked too good to be true.  There are some pretty big claims on the web site about the capabilities, feature and benefits. The web site itself is modern, stylish and very professional, so it’s a very easy decision to download the trial version and give it a go.

If that wasn’t enough to convince me to try it, then the full list of features and comparison charts showing the features available in each of the three versions (Standard, Professional, Enterprise) was more than enough to do so.

Download

The download file for this link manager is quite a large one (around 68MB) but came down smoothly and quickly.  There were no noticeable pauses or slowness which might be attributable to a slow server. No problems in this area at all.

Installation

Similarly, installation was a painless experience. I chose a Typical install and found myself having to answer minimal questions to get underway. No issues with the installation process at all. So far, so good, and painless too …

Having installed successfully, it was time to check out the look and feel, the usability and features of what so far had been a very good experience.

Doing the job …

I have to admit to being a little overwhelmed when I first started up Advanced Link Manager, but my fears were soon put to rest when I was taken straight into the “Getting Started” tutorial.  I was impressed with the Help provided and by the simple, easy to use interface, and it was obvious that it is more than just a link manager.

Although there are many tabs to get to grips with, everything is explained if you first make your way through the help sections provided.

Even the standard edition of Advanced Link Manager (Can we call is ALM for short ?) is packed with features.  Let’s go by the numbers from our list of tasks above and see whether ALM can help …

1) Find links back to your site and enter them into a spreadsheet or database

The standard version does this for you.  In fact, it’s one of the first things that you should do when you set up a project for the first time. Choose the search engines that you want to check for backlinks and ‘go’. ALM will search for backlinks and record them in its internal database.

2) Evaluate the quality of the site linking to you

ALM has a built-in tool (Analyze Domain Quality) to analyze the quality of domains. Simply enter the domain name to be checked and the tool looks up the Page Rank, link count average, and various statistics from Compete.com.
You will need the Enterprise edition to use this feature.

3) Find relevant sites that you want to exchange links with

The “Find Link Partners” wizard helps you find web sites based on your desired keywords and advanced search results from the search engines you choose to include.
You will need the Enterprise edition to use this feature.

4) Ensure that those sites are high quality and that they really are relevant to your site

The “Find Link Partners” wizard tells you the Rank of the pages found which may be beneficial to get links back to your site.
You will need the Enterprise edition to use this feature.

5) Find a contact email address for the owner of the site you want to link with

ALM extracts this information for you automatically from the WHOIS information for the domain name.

6)Email the owner of the site

ALM has a built in email client and you can set up template

7) Record the URL, contact details, and the date you tried to contact them

ALM stores this all for you automatically.

8 ) Keep a record of the email you actually sent them so that you can refer to it later

ALM stores a history of the messages that you send, so you can easily refer back to them.

9) Wait for a reply from the owner of the other site

You’ll have to do this one on your own

10) Manually create a link to their site when you get affirmative replies

ALM contains a wizard which allows you to generate link pages based on your custom templates, for all the sites you have exchanged links with.

11) Periodically verify that their link to your site still exists

Once again, ALM can do this automatically for all of the links that are recorded as pointing back at your site.  It will go through each one and check that it really is linking to your site.

12) Repeat for every single link you want to create to your site

With a tool like Advanced Link Manager, keeping track of all of your links is easy and it offers so much more.

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking

I was pleasantly surprised (I didn’t read the download information fully ) to find that what I had downloaded, was actually a bundled installation package containing both Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking. So, I actually already had Advanced Web Ranking installed and crying out to be tried out after I finished looking at Advanced Link Manager.

Doing the job …

So … you have gone to all the trouble of performing your on-page optimization.  You have used Advanced Link Manager to get inbound links to your web site (ie off page optimization).

What does it all add up to ?

How do you know that all your hard work is paying off and increasing your search engine ranking ?

That’s where Advanced Web Ranking comes in. You need a tool to actually measure and track your success, and you do not want to have to do the search manually for all of your relevant keywords across all search engines.

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) will do this all for you.  Simply create a new project, enter the websites you are wanting to evaluate, the keywords you want to check on, and the search engines to check.  Then … GO !!!

AWR performs all the search engine queries for you (just as if a human was doing it) and reports on the results.

It tracks your results over time and allows you to view your information in chart form or report format.  AWR also includes a Keyword Research Tool.  It’s a must have to check your website ranking !!!

Our View …

Advanced Link Manager is a top rate piece of software. We give it a 9.5 out of 10.

Advanced Web Ranking is one of the most useful pieces of software most webmasters could ever come across.
It also gets a 9.5 out of 10 from us and a high recommendation to download and try it out for yourself.

There is some pretty cool software available on the web, but it can take some hunting down and a bit of trial and error before you find exactly what you need.

A nice way of finding software that you need is to go for software that someone else has tried out before you and written a review about it.  Most reviews give an unbiased overview of the software along with a list of good and bad points.  You can use this information to help you determine whether you want to try the software out.  Even more importantly, a good review can help you decide whether you want to actually spend your hard earned cash and purchase a license for the software.

Over time, I will be writing reviews of software that I find useful, and posting them here under the category of … you guessed it … Reviews

This should benefit a large number of people, from end users through to software developers and marketers.

If you are an end user looking for software, or someone who likes to keep up with new, good quality software  then subscribe to the RSS feed for this site by clicking on the RSS icon at the top right of this page.

Software developers / software authors, if you would like me to review your software and post it here on site, I am happy to do so.  Generally speaking, I would be looking for a single user license for my personal use in exchange for doing this. Contact me with the details of your software to be considered for a review.

Yep … a great question.  When I talk about what I do with friends and colleagues, I am often asked the question  ”… but, if I was to write software, what software should I write ?”.

As a wise man once said to me :

Write about that which you know …

If you know about a topic, problem, situation it is often easy to write about it.  Likewise with software … which is usually written to solve a problem or make something a lot easier.

A lot of successful shareware / trialware authors started out writing a piece of software for themselves to solve a particular problem they were dealing with or something they were trying to make easier for themselves.

Take WinZip as an example.  This started off in the early 1990′s as a simple GUI frontend to the PKZIP compression software.  WinZip has been marketed as try before you buy (shareware) since day one and over the years has become a household name.

Since the advent of WinZip, compression support has been built into Windows and there have been many compression programs written, some free and some marketed as shareware.  There are even programs that help you recover your password from password protected ZIP files if you have forgotten it.

I write software … I have done so for many years, and I’m pretty good at it.

I wrote my first software program when I was 10 years old.   It was written in BASIC and was part of a science project I was working on.  The challenge was to classify an insect based on a set of Yes / No questions prompted to the user.  It worked, it was fun, and I was hooked …

Some 30 years later I still enjoy writing software … and now I make money doing so …

For the past 15 years, I have been writing software and marketing it and selling it as shareware or trialware. (See the FAQ posting on What is Shareware ?)

During that time I have learned a lot.  There have been many successes and there have also been failures.  In my opinion it is good to fail from time to time.  It means you have tried things.  If we never failed and only succeeded at everything we did then we would have to question whether we could have done more … did I try hard enough on that one ?  What if I had risked a little bit more … tried something out of my comfort zone.

So … yes … I’m quite willing to admit some failures on my journey through the world of writing software and selling it on the internet.

That journey is an ongoing one, and it’s time to share some of the successes and failures with  you. A quick bit of organisation on this site :

• Postings such as this one are categorized as Musings
• There will be FAQs, How To articles as well as Technical articles

Feel free to comment and ask questions …

I have been asked that question a lot over the years.  The term Shareware has been used, mis-used, abused and bandied around as a bit of ‘buzz’ over time.

I had to explain it to my parents (who are not technical people by any stretch of the imagination) when I told them what I was doing.  Of course they had read the occasional media piece which mentioned the word, but they just didn’t grasp the essence of it.

Shareware is simple … it is a generic term for a method of marketing software …

The term shareware is synonymous with trialware and try before you buy.

All three refer to the fact that you, as the potential customer, get to download the software and try it out before you actually commit to spending any money.

The ultimate goal for most (not all) software authors is to get people to buy their software.  It’s the simple old commerce thing … I’ll provide you with something useful … you may me some money to compensate my for my thought and hard work.

Without large marketing budgets and the ability to get boxed software in pretty packaging in front of retail consumers, authors who write software need a method of getting there software purchased by the end user.

Most users would not be happy to pay money for something that :

1. Is not a household name
2. Is not proven and reliable
3. May not do what they want

… unless of course they could try it out for free before having to commit their hard earned cash.

Software developers, there are many resources you can find on the Internet which will help you with developing and marketing your software :

• Association of shareware professionals
• MySharewareSite.com
• Trialware Professional Association
• aFreeGo.com
• aFreeGoGold.com
• PadRepository.com
• SoftwareDaemon.com
• MyFreewareSite.com
• AddMeToTheList.com

Welcome to SoftwareSites.info !!

If you have found this site for the first time, then we welcome you as a new visitor and hope that you will subscribe to the RSS Feed to receive regular updates, and that you will continue to return to the site to read the latest articles, musings, how to’s, technical information about software sites.

So, what is this site all about ?

Well, hopefully that is pretty well summarised by the domain name “SoftwareSites.info”.  The primary purpose of the site is to provide a place for me to impart my knowledge of and information about software sites … to you !!

What do you mean by Software Sites ?

There are squillions of software sites on the World Wide Web, where software authors provide you with information about their software.  Some software is free … some is able to be tried before you buy … some is commercial and must be purchased  before you can use it.  Regardless of whether the sites are shareware sites showing you details about author’s software, or whether the sites are the author’s sites showing off their own software … we are here to share our thoughts. knowledge, experience and technical know-how about these sites.

Welcome along and enjoy the ride …