The best thing about online advertising is the high conversion rate that you can get, meaning when the audience is exposed to your advertisement they are one click away from an endless opportunities of interaction with your brand; they can learn more about your company, and consume your products and services. Not any other media can offer this.

I was really disappointed when I came across this banner on AlGhad website, the banner was like a dead-end, it wasn’t clickable and the worse part is when they mentioned “for more details pleas visit our website”, so stupid. You can simply have a clickable banner the re-directs to a landing page with more details about that product/offer.

I was expecting better advertising strategies from Orange, which is one of the top telecommunication brands in Europe if not in the world, but seems like it will be as any other regular advertiser in Jordan.

Jordan is the land of online media and service providers; starting from Arabia to Maktoob, AlBawaba, souq, Araby, d1g, Jeeran, Ikbis and cashU. All successful examples in the online media industry was created and developed in Jordan, but when it comes to online advertising we are falling way behind, unfortunately.

I hate Google, well I’ve never thought I would say it but I really started to dislike Google. Recently Google really became thee web for me, whatever pops into my head Google finds it, and its a really amazing thing; anything.

In the past year jazarah! built a good position in Google, for many queries I used to be number one or at least in an advanced position - half (sometimes more) of my traffic used to be from Google but not anymore after the changes done by the search engine.

The thing that I don’t understand is things should get better not worse. I asked a friend of mine to help me, he is an expert in search engines, and he told me few tips and asked me to do few changed so that “Google bring me back to life”.

Duplicate content is one of things that may trouble you with Google, the duplicated content is your posts that are stored in more than one category,  and if you happened to have an archive on your site then things will get worse. I used to think that Google’s crawlers are intelligent but apparently they just crawl blindly, each post has a unique URL that will never ever be duplicated so how do Google’s crawlers see it more than once?

I don’t know if I will regret this, but TO THE HELL WITH GOOGLE.

Arrived last Friday to Riyadh in a business trip, we are participating in GITEX Riyadh 2007, for everyone the Saudi market is the most important market especially for the online business, but for me the best part of this trip is that I’m staying with my family for 2 weeks, I missed my nephews so much.

Last time I went to Saudi Arabia was like 12 years ago, I was a kid that time and since then I refused to go there again until the call of duty, I used to have a very negative image on Saudi; so very freaking hot, 3/4 of the internet is blocked, lots of restrictions and bounders, and a complicated life style.

I guess this trip might change my opinion about the country, from what I saw its not that bad to live in Saudi Arabia as long as you are living in a compound, its a very secured area contains villas and foreigners only are allowed to live there, few meters away from my brothers house there is a swimming pool, tennis fields and a basketball arena.

I was surprised when I was able to access flickr and YouTube, as far as I know such websites are blocked in Saudi Arabia, as for flickr it’s not working 100% photos sometimes doesn’t appear but at the end of the day you can work on it. When I asked my brother he said I thought they are blocked, strange.

When you are in a compound you don’t feel like you are in a country that forces lots of restrictions specially on females, the only thing you see is black dressed women, but inside the compound girls wearing shorts playing tennis, riding bikes and having fun, and swimming with bikinis, its a totally different world.

Marketing Saudi Arabia will begin now, my family who tried hard to convince me to work and live in Saudi will do the best they can to make the country look so beautiful and suitable to live in, but who knows they might succeed this time.

I came across a really interesting term; B.G. which stands for Before Google, pointing at the era before Google emerged to this world and changed the whole internet experience. I was born in the year 17 B.G., the first time I used a computer was 5 B.G. and first time I used the internet was year zero!

I wonder how life used to be before Google, I can’t imagine the internet without Google I’m using it to inquire about anything, Google succeeded to replace traditional knowledge tools that we have and became the trusted source for any piece of information.