To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Links system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the webpages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max Links pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Control Panel" of the Max Links system. This is the main operating page. The first time you come here, you’ll want to use the Add a New Reciprocal Link button. So let’s not look at the other elements of this page just yet. Just hit the Add a New Reciprocal Link button.

Entering Links

When you do, you’ll see a page that asks for:

• Site Url
• Site Title
• Contact Name
• Contact Email
• Published URL
• Category
• Description

Let’s go over these.

Site Url is the website address of the website you are linking to. Suggestion: use links that begin with www.domain.com and not http://www.domain.com

Site Title is the title of that site, while Description is the descriptory paragraph for that site. Typically, you'll receive an email from a webmaster asking for a link exchange which will include the Url, Title and Description.

Also included is a field for both Contact Name and Contact Email. These will be used in the automatically generated thank-you email.

The Published Url field is the location where the webmaster has published your link paragraph. Sometimes, webmasters will supply you with that. And sometimes, you have to specifically ask for it.  Personally, I make it a point to include the 'ask' in the template I create for the thank-you email.

The Category field is a drop-down list you can select from. It comes from the Configure Categories section.

Note that no TAB characters are allowed in the description. The TAB character is a special character used by the system, and will be converted to a SPACE character if used.

And that’s it. Now just hit the Add Link button, and the link gets added to the database of links on your website. You next see a screen which shows you what you entered.

List of Links You've Added

At this point, you go back to the Control Panel. And what do you see? You see your new link in the list of links. Only one is there, if this is the first link you’ve entered, but the list will expand as you add more links.

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the Site URL, Site Name and Category. When you click on the word View on the same line as the Site URL, it shows you all the information about that link. When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the Site URL, it takes you to a screen that looks just like the Add Links screen. Here’s where you can make changes to the link, if you need to. You can also choose to Remove the link completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Remove column, and then click the Delete Checked Links button at the bottom of the list. (It’s unlikely that you’ll want to do this, very often.)

Note that word Site URL at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by Site URL. The same is true of the words Site Name and Category. You can sort the list by Site Name or Category.

Now suppose you have lots of links. Say you have 500 links. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 30. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like.

What about the other buttons on this page? You can find out more here:

Now, let’s look at the Create Link Page(s) operation….