Let’s take a look on the top UAE English newspaper website and see their traffic ranking. I know that there are lots English newspaper in UAE but I would like to focus on the 3 major english newspaper in United Arab Emirates that I know, which I believe  the reputable and trusted broadsheet that exist in UAE and they are Gulfnews, Khaleejtimes and TheNational.

Gulf News (www.gulfnews.com) – It was launched on September 1 1996 seems to be the most popular with western expats. Broadsheet. Biggest selection of classifieds – property, cars, jobs. According to their website their online services includes the best of content from the main Gulf News newspaper, and up to the minute breaking news from around the Gulf region and the Middle East.

Khaleej Times (www.khaleejtimes.com) – According to their website Khaleejtimes was launched on 1978. The main competitor of Gulf News, seems to be more popular with the Asian community. Relatively good business section. Broadsheet. According to their site the broadsheet comprises of the general news section, the business pages and a lively sports section.

The National (www.thenational.ae) – It was launched on 17 April 2008 Abu Dhabi based broadsheet with lots of pages, lots of journalists, and lots of money. Owned by the Abu Dhabi government, published by Abu Dhabi Media Company. According to their website Thenational help to reinforce Abu Dhabi’s status as a global economic centre, as well as a political, cultural and social leader of the Arab world.

Here are the traffic ranking report according to compete.

As you can see in the above image. According to compete, Thenational.ae has now 34,246 Unique Visitors in July, growing a solid +42.66% compared to June leaving the Khaleejtimes behind the internet competition in terms of numbers which only has 30,204 Unique Visitors.

Comparing Thenational.ae which only exist for a year and Khaleejtimes that is already more than 3 decades in the country, I can obviously say that there is something wrong in Khaleejtimes website, Internet marketing team if they have one or in their web department.

I believe Khaleejtimes can do a lot better in their traffic numbers, they just need to search & analyse what is missing on their website which the two major English newspaper had it already.

How about gulfnews?! There are no doubt that gulfnews.com is still number one in traffic ranking if we are talking about numbers which has 61,577 Unique Visitors , though gulfnews and the rest of english broadsheet could not maintain their numbers which I believe that they still need a Search Engine Marketing team to handle and build their Online branding awareness.

If I’m going to give a one word to summed up their website traffic numbers what I can say to Gulfnews is “Bravo“, TheNational is “Impressive” and in Khaleejtimes is “Disaster“.

 screenshot showing gulfnews is using OpenCMS (click to zoom in)
 

I did not knew that Gulfnews-dot-com an online version of the daily newspaper located in Dubai is using an open source content management system which is OpenCMS. So I decided to blog it just to give you an information about it.

What is OpenCMS -  OpenCms from Alkacon Software is a professional, easy to use website content management system. OpenCms helps content managers worldwide to create and maintain beautiful websites fast and efficiently.

The fully browser based user interface features configurable editors for structured content with well defined fields. Alternatively, content can be created using an integrated WYSIWYG editor similar to well known office applications. A sophisticated template engine enforces a site-wide corporate layout and W3C standard compliance for all content.

OpenCms is based on Java and XML technology. It can be deployed in an open source environment (e.g. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL) as well as on commercial components (e.g.  Windows NT, IIS, BEA Weblogic, Oracle).

About Gulfnews - Since its launch on September 1 1996, gulfnews.com has been striving to deliver quality news online. Gulfnews website now offers several main services.

This includes the best of content from the main Gulf News newspaper, and up to the minute breaking news from around the Gulf region and the Middle East. Stories from the print edition will be online from early in the morning.

Then throughout the day and evening, gulfnews.com concentrates on constantly updating the website with the latest breaking news from around the UAE, the region, as well as major world events, gulfnews.com also gives readers a chance to have a voice on the big issues of the day, either by voting in our popular polls or by sending a comment into the 'Your Say' section.

Gulfnews.com also features extended photo galleries, which contain exclusive pictures taken by Gulf News photographers that couldn't make it into the print edition due to space constraints.

Aside from using OpenCms to run their web content management system. I look into some  search engine optimization factor of the site onpage, even though I think that they don't make it as a big deal because they are receiving a huge amount of user traffic around GCC countries, but I will still discuss it here for me to give you a little info about it. Ok let's start

Prob. no 1: URL Canocalization - search engine treats www.domain.com, domain.com, and domain.com/index.html as 3 different websites, the effect of which is that these pages are treated with goggle as different web pages with same content and these pages are possible can be penalized for this fact. This is a basic indexing issue and its problem with search engine indexing capability that it was unable to resolve this issue.

Gulfnews URL: gulfnews domain is using www.gulfnews.com/home, gulfnews.com/home www.gulfnews.com/home/index.html and http://gulfnews.com/home/index.html and as the above information about canocalization that this type of url's is treated by the search engine separately and it is possible for them to be penalized.

Prob No 2: Meta keywords& description – Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to search engine ranking. A meta keywords tag is supposed to be a brief and concise list of the most important themes of your page and a meta description tag is supposed to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content.

example of meta keywords
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords,keyword,keyword phrase,etc.">

example of meta description
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">

Gulfnews meta keywords & description - below is the meta description of gulfnews.com 

 (click to zoom in)

As you can see on the above image, gulfnews.com is using 64 words for their description and with 70 keywords. It should be 10 to 15 keywords / key phrases terms that most accurately describe the content of the page. If you can't narrow your keyword list down to 10-15 keywords, then the content on your page may be rambling to far.Because of the hyper-competitiveness of the current search engine placement landscape, pages need to be very focused on one or two specific keyword phrases in order to have a chance to get a top ten placement.

And when you writing a meta description tag, you should limit it to 170 characters or 200 characters at most and which gulfnews.com use 327 characters to their meta description. You should pick a style and be consistent throughout your pages, writing a unique description for each page of your site. Again, it is intended to provide a brief summary of the contents of the page.

that's is the 2 simple factor for SEO and they don't have it.. but it has a lot more.. will discuss it next, because my blog post will become longer and longer if I will do it here..