Dubai’s weather has been getting better and better by the day. I just missed the rain today but I loved the cool breeze on my walk home (Yup my crib is just 20 minutes walk away from office, how sweet is that?!).

So what’s up with this week’s Search Engine News? Well nothing much… We have announcements mostly from Google and let’s see 2 giants finalizing their collaboration deal. So let’s get on it…

I’d always start with my favorite updates and for this week it would have to be Matt Cutt’s presentation on the recent PubCon 2009. It was not an official announcement (which Google hardly does especially in disclosing search elements), but Matt Cutts discreetly implied  that site speed would be a possible ranking factor in 2010. Although I would assume site speed would not be a heavy-weighted ranking element, it will be a noteworthy action. Important note: we are not advocating that you do major changes on your site just to anticipate this update. But if you do build a site, redesign, re-brand, etc., do consider CSS, java, image files as well as codes and scripts that actually affect your site’s loading speed. This is Google’s attempt to make the web efficient and faster for users.

Which brings me to the next update – the SPDY Project. I’m not really a developer SEO hybrid (Yes, there are SEO Hybrids), you can see the technical details of the project on Google’s SPDY Whitepaper. I don’t know how to explain it in simple terms so I’m just going to quote Geek.Com’s description:

The project describes SPDY as a protocol that uses several methods to help improve web page load time through the use of HTTP header compression, prioritized requests and multiplexed data streams.

Another noticeable update on Google is the breadcrumbs rollout on their SERP’s. You won’t see this on all results yet because this is still a limited test. Personally, I think this is Google’s way of rewarding sites with excellent data architecture/structure. If you have great usability features for your visitors, then search engine spiders will benefit from such (of course that’s still a debatable theory). Whether or not Google will fully implement this feature in the weeks to come, only their engineers will know.

That’s enough of Big G, let’s take a look at Yahoo and Bing’s update. When we heard these 2 giants sign of a collaborative endeavor a few months back, almost everyone in the search industry was excited. I mean finally, someone has to stand up to Google and challenge its empire. But there weren’t definitive clauses on who will be in charge of which platforms. So last week Yahoo & Microsoft finally signed the definitive agreement that will govern both the search and advertising platforms. I’d be glad to see Microsoft’s technology and Yahoo’s content delivery performance together. (Psst Microhoo! Please keep Yahoo Site Explorer running, we still need it badly!)

There you go. That’s enough for last week’s search engine news. If I do have missed any important updates, you can drop us a comment or you can send us an email at news [at] seodubai [dot] org with the subject: “For Dave” (duh!)

Here at SEODubai.Org, we strive to bring you not only the freshest optimization techniques *cough* cheats, but we’ll also give you the hottest news from the industry.

We can’t promise to deliver you weekly updates, but we promise we’ll keep an eye for the most important news for your SEO, PPC, social media, and online marketing endeavors.

So let’s start of with a birthday bash. Mozilla Firefox celebrated its 5th birthday last November 9, 2009. First of all I would like to thank Firefox for giving us SEO’s a number if useful tools and gadgets that other browsers have lacked all these years. More power to you FireFox! (We still love you Chrome, don’t worry…)

Oh yes, how can we ignore the most talked about Google Caffeine Update which Matt Cutts has confirmed that it should roll out after the holidays. So will it affect our rankings? That is still debatable. However, I found the analysis made by Dave Naylor on Google Caffeine and “SEO” quite interesting.

Whenever Rand Fishkin and the rest of SEOMozers come up with a research or some statisticl analysis, every SEO would somehow turn to a kid waiting for that magical candy be given by these brilliant people. Well Rand tells us how Link Building Has Changed over the years and what matters most today.

I guess I was not the only who was excited enough to see Twitter closed the deal with Bing and Google. Although I haven’t seen Google released a beta on this new feature, I was impressed with BingTweets (it’s pretty neat and effective). Since both Bing and Google are off to an equal foot in this endeavor to enter into social media and real search scene, it would be interesting to see who delivers better.

Last week, PubCon Vegas was held. How I wish they would come to Dubai someday. Anyways, you can see the live blogging schedule at Search Engine Round Table. My personal favorite was the Super Session: Search Engines & Webmasters (Barry Schwartz you’re the man!!!)

And for all you Twitter addicts (myself included), SEO Twitter lists is now becoming a rising trend. I’ve seen a couple of great lists over the week but I’d have to give it to SEOptimise for coming up with 20 Twitter Lists for the SEO Industry.

So there you have it, I hope you enjoyed this week’s dose of search engine news. I gotta get back to my celebration mode coz my man Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao just won the title bout this morning. Booyah!

I’m quite excited to do my first post here at SEODubai.Org. And I would like to thank Jon for inviting me over to contribute.

So instead of covering the basics of search engine optimization, I would like to go a little bit technical. Last month I did a comparison of a couple of pages of one of the most competitive client websites that we have. Luckily, my big boss gives me the versatility to test out both on-page and off-page strategies and implement which suit best.

So here are the given facts for this particular website:

• Domain and website are 2 years old
• The website offers services to different parts of the world
• We’ve established pages by location serving an industry
• We are targeting the following keyphrases
  • Location Industry
  • Industry in Location

I won’t be disclosing any keywords that we are targeting by my client or the services they offer in their website, so I’ll be having industry (ex. Finance, jobs, shopping) and location (Dubai, London, Ney York) as examples. When I say [location industry], just imagine keyword combinations like London finance, or when you read [Industry in Location], you can imagine Jobs in Dubai or Shopping in New York. The point is we’re now targeting highly competitive keywords.

So let’s take a look at page behaviors in terms of rankings with the following on-page vs. off-page factors:

*Click to see a bigger image. Rankings were taken on Oct. 14th, 2009

Most of the data are pretty much self-explanatory except for keyword density. Keyword density is the percentage of the number of times a keyword / keyphrase appears divided by total number of words in a page copy. So for example if the keyphrase “SEO Dubai” comes up 3 times in this blog post and you have a total of 630 words, keyword density should be:

3 / 630 = 0.008333 x 100 = 0.83 % Keyword Density

Here are some important observations:

1. While the common trend now is to go for long tail keywords (3-4 word keywords), well I would say depending on the resources that you have, you can always target highly competitive keywords. Location1 Industry keyword had over 90 million competitors (now that’s rat race if you’ll ask me). We did not appear anywhere in the top 200 results back in August 2009. But when we decided to make a bold move to target a huge keyword we were able to make Location1 Page enter the page 2-3 Google SERP’s after 2 months of quality link building.
2. Location2 and Location3 page however is a very different story. These pages were uploaded recently. All it had were text book on-page optimization (Page title, meta description, Alt Image Tags, etc.). Approximately 1 ½ – 2 months after, without any external link building efforts, Location2 entered page 2-3 of the Google SERPs while Location3 entered page1-2 of the results.

So what now? These tests were conducted to find out the best possible combination of off-page and on-page efforts to better your rankings, gain traffic, and eventually gain conversion for your website. Although results may differ for each website (and sometimes environment), there are some basics which would apply

Here are my conclusions:

1. The tests just confirmed that keywords in page title, domain, URL, and meta description (forget about meta keywords, they don’t matter no more!) are still significant ranking factors. They have carried a huge weight in rankings ever since 2007 and they still have that punching power up until now.
2. Surprisingly, keywords in Image Alt Texts do have a high correlation just as what Rand Fishkin has explained in SMX Advanced 2009.
3. If you’re competing for high-volume traffic, low competition keywords, you can go a long way with text book on-page optimization as evidently shown by our Location2 and Location3 pages which have 0 inbound links but have ranked significantly for their targeted keywords.
4. If you’re working on your link building campaigns, be sure to concentrate on both quantity and quality. Make sure that your links acquire the correct (most of the times exact) combination of keywords on your anchor texts. SEOMOz has ranked 2nd and 3rd – link popularity and anchor text of external links in the top ranking factors of 2009.
5. Search engines may somehow favor static (html) over dynamic (aspx) pages. However, search engines have now gotten better in indexing and ranking dynamic pages. You can read more about this argument on Static Pages vs. Dynamic Pages, Which is Better for SEO.

So there you have it. It pays to keep a close eye on your optimization efforts. Remember that what may work for one website may not necessarily be effective for the other website. Don’t be too obsessed with rankings though, because rankings will always just be a part of your important KPI’s. Pay attention to traffic, rankings, and most of all conversions of your website. Test, observe, modify (if necessary), implement (if proven effective) and repeat the process.