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User Guide |
Table of Contents
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/user-guide/pdf/en/alm_en.pdf
1. Creating a 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 and MSN search engines as they are two 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 linking 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.
The "Get all available results" option will set the project to retrieve all available results from the search engines.
Click on the [Finish] button to complete "New Project Wizard" and load the project in Advanced Link Manager. Our project has been successfully created and it will automatically start updating.
The next time we want to update our project we need to bring up the "Update dialog".
2. Updating a 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 of two steps:
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First it will look for pages (in each of the search engines from our 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.
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Next it will check whether the web pages found are actually linking to our website. Once the update is complete you will be able to see all the information gathered in the Interactive Reports. We will discuss more about the reports in the next tutorial.
3. Monitoring our competition
Now let's say we also want to monitor some of our competitors. Let's go to [Project] -> [Project Settings]. The Project Settings dialog will pop up with the Domains tab selected by default. Let's add two more websites to the list: "www.cnn.com" and "news.google.com"
Click on the [OK] button to save the new changes. We have just added the competition's domains in our project, but there is currently no data gathered for these new domains. So we 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.
Next, check out the Basic Reporting tutorial to learn how to read the data from the reports.