Active Link Exchange Help: Find New Partners Wizard.

As soon as you have created a new project, you can start researching the right link exchange partners for your web site. Your ultimate objective is to obtain targeted, high quality inbound links from the most popular and better ranked web sites on your desired sector or area of interest. Of course you can use the Partner Research Wizard anytime you wish to find new potential web sites and add them to an existing link exchange project.

To start Active Link Exchange partner research Wizard, from the main menu, click on "Project/Find New Partners".



Or just click on the "Find New Partners" button on the main program screen.

● Partner Research Methods:
There are three ways to look for link exchange partners:



- Finding web sites that are actively linking to your competitors (you want those web sites to link to your site as well). This is a powerful tool that let's you find out if your competitors are involved in a link exchange strategy. If one of your competitors is quite successful on the internet a good bet is that they have key partnerships and high quality inbound links. It's a good idea to replicate his network exchanges to drive a portion of your competitors traffic to your website right away!

- Find web sites by keywords related to your site on the search engines (this is a nice option to follow when starting out your link exchange and when you are targeting and focusing on a specific sector).

- Find web sites that are already linking to you: you may want to find out who is already linking to your site. You can then include these friendly sites on your link exchange page and let them know that you appreciate their link.

Of course you can use all three options at anytime as you wish and incorporate the results on your project. As your link exchange project gets larger you may want to focus on different keywords or competitors.

● Select the search engines to be used for research:
The next step is to select the search engine to be used for research. Active Link Exchange performs searches on all the major search engines and even on local search engines by country.



- Add Keyword: this field is displayed when researching web sites by keywords. Just enter your specific keyword. For example if you sell astronomy books or are interested to partner with web sites about astronomy books just enter "astronomy books" on this field. Active Link Exchange will perform searches by that keyword in the selected search engines.

- Competitor Url: this field is displayed when researching web sites that link to your competitors. Enter your competitor url such us http://www.mycompetitor.com. Active Link Exchange will search for sites that link to your competitor web site in the selected search engines.

- Select one or more search engines: specify where do you want Active Link Exchange to search for potential partner web sites. You may select all by clicking on the "Select All" button or be more specific by selecting your target country and search engine. For example if you just want to target the top rated sites in Yahoo US, click on USA and then mark the Yahoo box. Searches will then be performed only in the Yahoo US search engine.

- Update button: click on the "Update" button to check if there are any updates for the research wizard's search engine list. If we have added new search engines or have modified the search algorithms, the program will automatically update the search engine list for you.

When you are done click on the "Next" button.

● Set search parameters and filters:
You can further configure and target your link exchange research by setting search parameters and optionally adding search filters.



- Maximum number of links to find per SE: the number of links that you want to retrieve from each search engine. The default setting is 20 and will search only for the best positioned (top rated) 20 links on any given search engine.

- Maximum number of parallel connections: this is the number of simultaneous http connections used by the program when searching for links. The default 5 will work fine for most projects. Increasing this number will increment the speed of search.

- Assign status: all web sites found will be assigned the status you specify on this field. The default is "Undecided". If for example you are researching web sites that already link to your site you can assign the status "Web site links back" by selecting it from the drop down box. Or if you were looking for web sites that link to competitors you can select the status "Web site belongs to competitors".

- Add links to the following category: if you plan to have a multi category link exchange project and you are researching potential partners by keywords you may want to assign all sites found to a specific category. For example if you are using "astronomy books" as the keyword phrase for search and you previously created a project category called "Astronomy books" you may assign all sites found by the research wizard to that category.

- Add filter for search button: click on this button to enter restrictions to your search. You can add any filtering condition including: ignoring web pages containing certain words or phrases; ignoring certain domain name extensions (such as .org, .tv, .biz and so on); ignoring specific urls to be included in your link exchange (such as avoiding your competitors urls as in the example below) or ignoring web sites containing specific email addresses.



When you are done setting the search parameters and filters click on the "OK" button and then on the "Next" button. The partner research wizard will start searching for web sites that fit your research parameters.



● Incorporating the partner research wizard results:
Active Link Exchange will return the best potential partners for your link exchange project according to your research parameters. You can browse and select the returned sites individually by search engine or just select them all by clicking on the "Select All" button. Then click on the "Extract" button to incorporate the selected web sites into your list of desired link partners.



- + box: click on this box to browse through the web sites found and expand the results found for each search engine.

- Check boxes: click on the check boxes next to each search engine or web site result to select or unselect specific sites.

- Select All button: click on this button to select all sites found by the partner research wizard.

- Unselect All: click to clear the selection.

- Extract button: click on the "Extract" button to incorporate the selected web sites into your list of desired link partners.

When you have extracted your selected sites click on "Finish". The new web sites are now incorporated into your list of link exchange partners with all their data including their url, web title, contact email address and web rank (web position on the search engine) and you can start managing them from the main program interface.