If you are SEO specialist, seo/sem manager or seo consultant  in dubai this blogpost will might help you. By doing a keyword / key phrases research on what people are looking for and analysing how many of them, you can basically leverage your company site, blogs or pages that sits through to the internet by ranking your website in different serps and monetize it once you achive your ranking goal.

Do you know by using keyword research tools, you can see what actually people search? and not only that you can also see the approximately figures on how many people are searching for a specific keywords / keyphrases.

Let’s start by searching & analysing which keywords are people interested in when searching the search engines like Google, Yahoo & the microsoft search engine Bing.

What I did is, I used the keyword Dubai and the tool populates all related keywords and keyphrases that is related to Dubai.

The image below shows the top 10 keywords which people searched for that is related in Dubai and the volum of traffic if people searching for an exact keywords and key phrases.

Just a note we are looking for Top 10 Keywords in Dubai and if you want to digg deeply on each top keywords / key phrases that I listed, just use some recommended keyword like google keyword tool and apply the same steps.

Once you choose your keywords you can now start optimizing your website. enjoy SEO in Dubai.

I stumble a retweet from Dave about SEO stuff, so I decided to click and read it, while reading Dave’s blog it directs me to Tom Gara’s blog post titled “Is SEO our friend? Enemy? Frenemy?”

It really gets my attention so I decided to comment from beepbeep blog section of thenational.ae but apparentlyAfter creating a long comment when I click Submit button it does not allow me to do it as it gives me an error. see the image below.

maybe I use the special word which is SEO..:) so I just decided to post my comment here in my blog and at least it also helps me to update my blog too. Thanks to the error

Below is the start of my comment about SEO is our friend. Enjoy!

I will try to understand and explain some points of your blog post and first my answer in your title is YES! SEO is our friend and not enemy and we will find it why, after I finish my comment:)

“Scott thinks that local companies need to do a better job with search engine optimisation (SEO), but I disagree – and I’ll tell you why, after the jump.”

I do agree with Scott, Why?, First I will give some info about search engine or best example is google. Google is a search engine platform which has step-by-step procedure and it called algorithm. This algorithm index, crawl & process billions of websites and return a relevant result when someone made a query.

By helping google and other search engines to index your website you need to comply on some guidelines and SEO comes into play.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is process of improving your online web presence. If let say you search for “computer stores in Dubai” and you cannot find what you are looking for does not mean it’s search engines fault, which In my opinion it’s the responsibility of each business entity not embracing the power of online web presence which I think UAE is a bit fuzzy knowing the advantage of SEO, which I definitely agree with Scott that companies needs SEO but in the other hand, I don’t agree blaming why google can’t give the information that you are looking for.

It’s the same process of offline marketing, companies like here in Dubai spend so much money building in these gigantic brands offline to help potential customers to notice them. Applying that in SEO except of course spending to much money, companies need to comply in search engine guidelines to help search engine like google to crawl, index and process companies website to help search engines to offer a better results for potential customers.
It’s like having a huge billboard ads in the middle of the desert and having fancy website which is not well optimize which will be useless and will not help your customers notice your brand at all.
So yeah SEO is our friend.. and SEO will help you notice your brand:)

Google rocks when it comes to factual information (finding a company website or wikipedia entry or whatever), but type in “boutique hotel in Hong Kong” or “cheapest flights from Dubai to London” and you will get page after page of spam – spam that has been well optimised to make it to the front page of google search results.

I do agree, that is one of many strong point of search engine. I also agree that spam is the main problem of search engine but it also helps them to enhance their algorithm in terms of processing and detecting spammy websites.

In my opinion in any form of life there is always an opposite of good which is bad and SPAMMY website is one of the bad side or should I say Blackhat Side .

Regarding your query about “boutique hotel in Hong Kong” or “cheapest flights from Dubai to London” which I agree that you are getting some spam results but not all. I suggest try this link
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861 for advance search or help google for better search results by reporting websites that you think it’s spam or does not even related to your search query.

Link for Spam report: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

What you really want when you type “computer stores in Dubai” is to find a great blog post or newspaper article, written by somebody who knows and cares, listing the city’s best computer stores. Sure, someone like CompuMe or Jumbo Electronics could spend more money on getting to the front page, but then, so can anyone, including some random page of googlebait whose entire business model is to get clicks from google searches and surround useless information with ads.

My answer here is to find the right SEO firm/people to optimize their product and to leverage the power of Online presence. In SEO it’s always the right firm/people, I believe that anyone can do SEO, but it takes an expert to implement it successfully for better success and profit.

This is where Google is getting slowly ruined. There is real, serious, money in getting among the top ten links, and wherever there is money, rent-seeking spambots and general uselessness will follow.

I believe Google is still #1 it helps us in our day-to-day life in anything we need from finding people, weather forecast, news, currency and a lot more.

Let say in a facts that Google populate spam links when we try search some queries, compare google to yaho, msn, live and other search engines that are currently existing throughout the internet, I think google is still far better than the other in terms of web results..

@Richard Swan

I totally Agree

Dave from Click-Dubai.Com

I also agree but one thing that I don’t quite agree which is

If companies have employed at least textbook SEO best practices, rest assured they’ll be on the top SE results on their respective industry searches.

Not all context within SEO book gives you better results and better return, it can help you at least to start with but of course all of this are debatable. SEO is big SEM is bigger so i think it really depends how you will apply it.

I hope my comment makes sense.:P as I am typing which comes to my mind so please bear with me. I will also try to make a post into my SEO Dubai blog about this.
update: and I did

Of course thanks to you Tom Gara, it’s so nice to have this kind of healthy blog discussion about SEO stuff.

That’s why I recommend all SEM peeps around UAE should organize meet-ups or put up a group to discuss how we can promote digital marketing within the UAE.

Kudos given to Richard & Dave!

A few weeks ago,I had a meeting with one of the Real Estate Software Company in Dubai to do freelance SEO for their product which is property management software. Not mentioning the company name, it is one of the leading property management companies in Dubai. The meeting lasted for almost 45 minutes and some of the discussions we tackled were mostly about search engine marketing and web analytics. The questions that were asked were mostly regarding SEO and samples of my work, which were:

1. Can you optimize our property management software website?
2. How will you optimize our website?
3. Give me some sample of your SEO work. / Give me some examples of your SEO work.
4. Do you know how to use web analytics especially Google analytics? However if we choose you, can you teach me how to use it?
5. What do you think of the new website?
6. Can you please let me know the step by step how you will optimize the website?

Okay, so let’s stop it from here. Refer to the list mentioned above, I answered no. 1 to no. 3 and right after that question we moved on to the next with “Can you teach me how to use it”, I suddenly paused for a while and answered: YES! Of course (without hesitation). Then moving on to the 5th question, I answered it too and as far as I could remember, I told them that their website is great with XHTML 1.0 and CSS valid.

Then the 6th question came “Can you please let me know the step by step how you will optimize the website?” I paused and thought about it. Why is he asking me this question? I felt a little doubt on the side. So, I told him I needed to have some research first and ask him some questions just to learn about their products and objectives, he replied back quickly “No No, I just need to know how will you do it.” So, to make him happy, in regardless of the doubts I was having, I still managed to go on with the discussion concerning some of the process of SEO that I will carry out to the Dubai property management website. While going over the process of Research, On-page Optimization and Off-Page Optimization, I can see that he was listening and on the other hand, listing it all to a piece of paper.

After having all the steps listed, he wasn’t satisfied enough and asked me another question: “How will you do the research?” and I said, “I am going to askt some questions in regards to your product, website, your target audience, whether it is regional or international, etc. Things like that.” And he replied, “Okay, okay. How about On-Page and Off-Page Optimization, How will you do it?” then I replied again “On On-page Optimization it is a process by which some of page elements of the website are structured so that the web page can be found by the search engine easily. Some of the elements include Meta’s, keyword density, website structured, navigation, basic redirect using 301 and sitemap”and in Off-Page Optimization“Some samples are website directory submission and article directory submission”. While explaining and discussing about this SEO process to him, he was still listing it all to his piece of paper together with all of the steps that I mentioned previously. After the long question and answer portion, came the final stint. He then told me that I needed to give him a copy of the SEO Proposal for their review purpose and will just contact me back if I got the project or not.

Then I said “Oh ok. But I still need to ask you about the website and some of what I have mentioned earlier so I can do a research, and if you can introduce your product to me… like how it works, some of the features, is it web or desktop application so I can give you a proposal to fit to your business” he replied to me again saying “do your own research about this and get back to me with the proposal.”

In our earlier discussion, I had doubts that they weren’t looking for an SEO expert in Dubai to optimize their real estate software Dubai website, what they actually needed was someone they can use to guide and teach them how SEO works without spending money on how they will do it. I’ve already been in meetings with a lot of clients who were looking for SEO Dubai service and most of them, you can tell that they were really interested and some was just getting the idea and gaining more about the SEO stuffs so they can apply it for themselves.

Now, this question still lies at the back of my mind, are these companies really looking for a SEO Consultant in Dubai? Or just learning and lurking?

After 3 days of doing my own research and working on the proposal I emailed it to the concerned person I was dealing with. Sadly, after 3 weeks from the meeting that we had, he hasn’t replied until now.