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

Today, we are at the Arab Bloggers meeting, the second. It started with a conversation, a dream, or for people who know me, a moan. “Why can’t we have something like this for Arab bloggers?” I told Tunisian Sami ben Gharbia, my colleague at Global Voices, as we Skyped with him from Miami last year.

Thanks to Sami’s relentless efforts, and funding from The Heinrich Böll Foundation and Global Voices Online, with support from HIVOS and the Open Society Institute, we meet in Beirut today: Around 80 bloggers from 19 countries.

Bloggers from Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Morocco, Algeria, Oman, Tunisia and Yemen are here – as well as Americans, a Brit, a Dutch, a few Germans and a Bolivian.

We are all gathered here, from December 8 to 12, to discuss all that there is to talk about related to blogging, citizen journalism, new media and how to get people talking to each other and connecting with one another. The event is super friendly, with many of us having met before or connected virtually and it is a big happy party.

There is a lot of work too – as people network and learn from each other, attend one presentation after the other, try to clone themselves to attend as many workshops as they possibly can fit into and continue to have an overwhelming sense of awe and appreciation for all that is happening. Being at such gatherings, meetings that have been put together carefully and where all the participants are genuine, is a humbling experience.

The Internet connection is so so here. The tech people are trying their best. For regular updates, tune into to #ab09 on Twitter, where I tweet as @JustAmira

If there is anything blogging or citizen media related you would like to touch on, please contact me or send me a direct message on Twitter and we will try to accommodate as much of the feedback we get.

Stay tuned, and happy and safe blogging.

Cross-posted from Silly Bahraini Girl

The second day of the Arab Bloggers Workshop kicked off with a presentation about Herdict Web, a site which uses crowdsourcing to gather reports of Internet filtering from users around the world. Qatari workshop participant Muhammad Basheer tweeted a photo from the presentation:

Following the first presentation, Egyptian blogger Manal discussed the world of Arab techies, particularly touching about female techies in Egypt. Lebanese NightS noted the need for more women at #ab09:

After Manal’s informative presentation, the bloggers broke into group workshops, touching on a variety of subjects. One workshop, conducted by hamzoz, focused on blogging from Iraq. Muhammad Basheer attended the presentation and tweeted:

Creative Commons rep Donatella Della Ratta also attended, tweeting:

Bahraini participant Amira Al Hussaini attended a presentation by the lead of the new Rising Voices project in Yemen. She was clearly impressed by the workshop:

The last major presentation of the day was once again perhaps the most captivating. Anas Tawileh, founder of Meedan, presented on the Arabic-English crowd translation project. Iraqi blogger Salam Pax best captured the sentiment in this tweet:

Tawileh opened his presentation with a number of interesting facts about the Internet including one that the number of hours spent on Facebook in a year, translated into volunteer hours, could be spent to build the Giza pyramids in only 9 days. Amira Al Hussaini shared another of Tawileh’s tidbits:

Tweeting about the concept, Moroccan GV author Hisham G. summed up Meedan in a few words:

Lastly, Meedan itself (which has covered the workshop here) noted on Twitter that they’ll be translating tweets from the conference (which can otherwise be found on hashtag #ab09):