Interview with Egyptian Blogger Ahmad Gharbeia

Ahmad Gharbeia is an advocate of open source software and open content based in Cairo, Egypt. He frequently trains bloggers how to publish information securely and anonymously, and was part of the team that translated Tactical Technology Collective’s Security in-a-Box toolkit into Arabic. He is @agharbeia on Twitter.

Interview with Doreen Khoury

Doreen Khoury is a program manager at the Middle East Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, the co-organizers of the Arab Bloggers Meeting. She previously worked as a senior researcher and elections specialist at the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, and served as executive director of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections. She is @doreen_khoury on Twitter.

Arabic Bloggers Forum in Beirut: How to make your blog URL on Google search first page?!

The 2nd Arab Bloggers Forum that takes place in Beirut from the 8th to the 13th of December has gathered 60 different bloggers from all the Arab World to exchange their experiences and give tips in how to become a more professional blogger in the Arab region.

Who among you have ever heard of SEO? SEO is the Search Engine Optimization. But what is that really? And why does the 2nd Arab Bloggers Forum give a one hour presentation about it.

Amir has the answer. Let us say you own a blog, a website or anything on the internet. If you are posting something for yourself, then you do not need your link to be published on the first page of Google search. But what if you want more readers, more viewers and to promote yourself or your product more. Then you need to master the SEO rules.
Google and other search engines (such as Yahoo) do not put pages in random on the top page. They follow a strategy. They look into two factors. The first is to have your key words related to the search that people usually type into the search engine. But what are those words? There is always an answer.

Use adwords.google.com. This service allows you to know how many people are searching for this word per month. You could also help in knowing the number of people searching for this world per country or per language too. This is step one. You identified what words have more searches on. Here you have to take care of the following, if the word or sentence you are looking for has many viewers; this means that this word is very competitive. It is unlikely that you have your publication on the first page. For example, “Beirut” will have around 300.000 hits per month; this means it will be hard for you as a new blogger to have your blog on the first page. What will you do in this case? You choose a word which is less competitive.

Step two is using those words in your publication. Let us say you found that the phrase “Crazy Lebanese” have around 50.000 searches in a month. Here is your domain which you can compete in. You use those words “Crazy” and “Lebanese” in your publications. It is more important that you use them in the Blog title, in the parts titles and the categories.

Ok now you have made your preparation to make Google look into your website. But what will guarantee that you will be on the first place? Google will be searching for how many links you have? So now all you have to do is to create links to what you are posting (watch out, do not link to your whole website, link to the thing you want to promote – copy the URL). Post it everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, your friends. Ask other people to promote your post. Deceive Google by getting more links from everywhere. The more hits you get, the more it will make your publication go further in the Search Engine. Now you know what is SEO. This is just an example of what was going on Twitter: “Amir was arguin(g) how can we attract links/traffic 2 websites/blogs by usin(g) SEO, @NightS said this is Google’s definition of ranking => #AB09”.

This interesting presentation is a part of of the AB09 (the used hash on Twitter of the Arab Bloggers Forum) workshop series. Other workshops will discuss other topics such as: “What is the effectiveness of Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook?”, “Discussion why we blog and why we don’t” run by Wael Abbas, a prominent Egyptian Blogger, “Security and Privacy” on the Internet with how to lock your computer and how to secure your websites against hackers. Other sessions will include presentations about “Kulna Leila” project to promote women’s rights in the Arab world throughout digital media, “Hibr Lubnani” Lebanese magazine and website along with the Jordanian Newspaper “7ibr” to talk about their experiences as free citizenship and youth media outlets.

Cross-posted from hibr.me

Interview with Ghaida’a al-Absi

For the past year, Ghaida’a al-Absi has been leading citizen media workshops for female activists in Yemen as part of the Hand in Hand Initiative. The project called “Empowerment of Women Activists in Media Techniques [ar]” has been funded by the Rising Voices outreach arm of Global Voices Online.

To follow along with the progress of the project, please visit their Flickr site and Facebook group.

اليوم الأول في ملتقى المدونين العرب الثاني: ورشات عمل و نقاشات مثيرة للاهتمام