With reciprocal linking the other site adds a link, because you offer their visitors useful content. Locating websites for linking, involves finding relevant quality sites, obtaining contact details, writing and sending a contact email, and tracking the link requests and responses. You must also create a link directory, keep it updated and check other sites maintain a link to you over the months and years. All this can be a very time consuming task. When you're one-person running a business and a web site you need to be looking to work smarter not harder. To help with the task of reciprocal linking, are two leading software programs, ARELIS and Zeus. The versions of ARELIS, Zeus, discussed are Arelis Standard V4.3.2 and Zeus Pro V3.0.51.
First Impressions Zeus Pro is available from Cyber-Robotics.com as a directly downloadable file (10.6MB) for $195. It comes with a 100% refund guarantee within the first 45 days after purchase and can be used on multiple web sites. It's also available in a limited demo version. ARELIS from Axandra.com is available in two versions Standard €99.95 ($122) and Business €299.95 ($366). The business version is aimed more at optimizers wanting to offer reciprocal linking services to clients and includes support for unlimited web sites, statistics and client billing. The standard version is restricted to two web sites. Both versions come with free updates, and a 30 day full money back guarantee and are directly downloadable. The standard version comes as a 3.07MB file. There is also an Arelis demo version that has some functions limited. Zeus reciprocal linking - First UseZeus Pro has good pre-use video tutorials and online help as well as built-in offline help. It also comes with assisted training, that steps you through a series of questions. You need to answer the questions in order to ensure you've understood how to use various functions in the program. It has three modes of operation, Easy, Intermediate and Advanced. My first impression of using Zeus was that it has the feel of a somewhat outdated interface that does not behave in the intuitive fashion an experienced user of software programs would expect. In the Easy mode, the program can quickly become irritating as it keeps cycling you through the same series of questions and answers training. Zeus requires you to train it over a period of time so as it can more accurately find themed sites to which you would want reciprocal linking. The process starts by giving it keyword's and phrases that are associated with your site and to those you want linking. Before the program will start to look for linking sites you must supply it with 100 keyword's or phrases. It helps with suggestions it makes for other possible keyword's based on what you supply. It can however, take quite some time to reach the default 100 keywords. Once the 100 keyword limit was reached during the "Train" process it was possible to "Find" sites and Zeus connects to the Internet and starts looking for sites with these keyword's. After several hours of running it had found all the sites it could and wanted more keyword's.
On three occasions Zeus was locked in a loop trying to update its records. Closing and restarting the program did not correct the problem. After a couple more hours training, with another 60 keyword's, total now 160 it still would not find more sites, reporting it could not find any. Contact to the Zeus support desk did not explain the reason except to suggest giving them a telephone call to discuss the problem. Not a very sensible idea for an international customer, so the final suggestion was to re-install the software. Once re-installed, the software continued to find sites from 160 keywords it had. After several days of running, it had visited almost 25,000 sites, reported another 23,000 to visit and found 644 themed sites. Zeus has a scoring algorithm in order to prioritize how close it thinks a site matches what you are looking for before it regards it as themed. Since I was not prepared to let Zeus run continuously, I needed to shut down the program and recommence searching at a later time. On one occasion after 4 hours of running I needed to close the program and start again later. To my horror the themed sites it had found before I closed the program had not been added to the total. This meant all the site records were lost.
Starting to review the 644 themed sites it had found, I was surprised to see the range of scores Zeus gave to these sites. The range extended from as low as 109 to a score of 324,000 and viewing the sites I considered many of them totally irrelevant. The program also has a feature which I could never get to function. It has a date indicator that is supposed to tell you the last time a site was visited for more than 30 seconds using the programs own inbuilt viewer. This indicator never changed from 'not visited' for every site I visited no matter how long I stayed viewing the page with the viewer. The viewer window for reviewing web sites was also too small, occupying just 30% of the available screen area. It's made smaller by the fact that there is an advertising banner that occupies over 9% of the screen. The banner sits over the top of the viewer window and incorporates rotating advertisements for other company products. If I get a program for free, I expect to have advertisements, but when I pay for the program I find it's something I object to. At this stage I stopped using Zeus to turn my attention to ARELIS. The final part of Arelis v Zeus is at:Reciprocal Linking - ARELIS beats Zeus - Part 2 | 
