Creating A New Project
As you might expect, a project is, basically, the web site you are promoting by exchanging links with other web sites. One project contains all information about the reciprocal link partners for a single domain. So if you manage the links for only one domain, you need only one project, for two domains you need two projects, etc. Each project can have an unlimited number of links, categories, page templates, email letters to/from your link partners, etc.
To start a new project you can just choose File –> New Project from the menu or simply click the New Project button on the Project Management Toolbar. If for some reason the look of the buttons isn't intuitive enough for you, you can find out which buttons do what by hovering your mouse over them and reading the tool-tips.
Project Management Toolbar
Whichever way you prefer to start a new project, LinkAssistant then displays the Create New Project window asking you to provide some additional information. The window is pretty straightforward, so we will only note a few things you need to accomplish to create a brand-new project. Please keep un mind that all these fields' values may be later used in your custom email templates and links pages templates.
New Project Dialog (Projects Properties Pane)
Enter the exact URL for the website you are promoting into the Project Domain
field. Usually you will want to specify the homepage here, since this
is the page you typically need your reciprocal link partners to point to.
Hit the Info button. This is an interesting little button that tells LinkAssistant
to try and automagically fill in some of the fields that follow below,
using the meta tags of the Project Domain URL. Obviously, a working Internet
connection is required for this. If you are using a direct Internet
connection, all you need to do is establish it. If you are behind a firewall,
you might also need to conigure your proxy settings, including your
username and password.
The Project Name field is simply a descriptive name you can use to refer
to your project (usually it's a name your company), while the Project Description
field is merely a description used for the same purpose. The Project Name value is
usually used as an anchor text and
is very important for search engines.
That is why we recommend to include keywords and key phrases into your Project Name.
The Contact Name and the Project Email fields are the name and the email address
you wish others to use when addressing you in email correspondence. You might want
to use your real name or a generic name such as "Webmaster" to be used as your
contact name, but you'd rather use an existing email address if you wish to send/receive
letters to/from your partners.
A few words about the right-hand pane which displays Search Engine Popularity.
New Project Dialog (Search Engine Popularity Pane)
This pane allows you to track the so-called link popularity of your project in major search engines including Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Link popularity is a SEO term used to describe the number of hypertext links indexed within the same search engine and coming to a website from other websites. In simpler terms, this essentially means how many other guys link to your site. These values are very important if quality traffic is your goal, since all the major search engines use link popularity as a means to calculate your website's rating.
Google PageRank is yet another interesting feature. Google uses its own algorithm to determine a website's importance, and assigns each site it indexes a value of 0 to 10. This value is called PageRank, and the number of backward links is a major part of it.
