About Arelis

Arelis is a program that helps you find quality linking partners, and tracks and
manages who you have linked to. It searches for sites based on keywords you enter
and returns a list of matching sites.

What’s nice about Arelis is that you can click and preview each site in the interface. It
also allows you to look up the domain record (similar to SEO Elite) in order to get the
email address of the site owner. Arelis also shows you the link text for all links, and
has columns for you to check whether you link to the site and whether the site links
back to you.

Arelis has a number of sample email templates that you can modify and then send
out to prospective site owners. Although not recommended, Arelis also builds Link
pages for you automatically.

When using Arelis to generate your Links page, make sure you modify the page to
make it look like a page on your site and not one of the cookie-cutter template
layouts.

For more information on Arelis, see http://www.axandra.com. I encourage you to
download the trial version, read the online manual, try it out and learn it thoroughly.


The General Link-Building Process

The general process for setting up and managing a link-building campaign is as
follows. There is an expanded process that applies to reciprocal linking campaigns
that will be discussed later. I recommend you use tools such as SEO Elite or Arelis to
help you out, but you can do this manually too.

1. Do a search of your most important keywords on Google. Look at the top 30
   results. These sites are either your competition or are complementary sites to
   yours. Also look at sites that are listed in the ODP and in Yahoo in the same
   market as your business.

2. Determine which sites link to you now. You can use SEO Elite or Arelis, or you
   can use the Yahoo backlink command as follows: Go to http://www.yahoo.com
   and type the following in the Search the Web box: