Arabic Search Engines

Several Arabic Search Engines are currently existing in the market, with a focus toward the Arabic community. Being the Sixth largest spoken language in the World with more than 250 million arabic speaker, with more than 70% of the population are between the age of 20-40, marketers eyeballs is starting to turn toward this population and their potential spending power on the internet.

In the United States, Arabic speaking communities are considered extremly important in ethnic TV both on line and in cable, as they are usually holding the lion share of subscribers base in those mediums.




Eyoon is a web directory for Arabic websites. Started in 1995. Mainly focusing on Arabic speaking countries



Araby is a new search engine that index arabic websites. Moreover, they index images, and blogs



4arab.net is another search engine. The indexed sites are still limited

Nesnas, which means "Monkey" is a large portal and search engine fo Arabic websites.

Arabiks is a small index, but it provides a CPC advertizing option
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Ayna seems to a winner, in terms of indexing as well as provided portals services.

Connecting offline and online marketing for better tracking and analysis

How can you connect visitors and customers resulting from TV, Radio and Print to your internet visitors and sales during the initial testing period for large marketing campaigns?

Several methods are available. We experimented with few of them with different clients. The best method depends on who your client is and his background.

If your client has a media background (TV, Radio), s/he will be more concerned about retrieving the resulting conversions; the easiest way is to assign a "Promotion code" to each distinct ad, so that when a visitor signs up for to the service/product, he may fill out the "Promotion code".

If your client is more technology oriented, s/he will be interested in more information about the visitors’ behavior, from the landing point to the exit point. For those clients, provide unique urls for each ad.

If we want to take it vise versa, from online marketing to offline sales, that is someone finds your product online, and now, they decide to use the 1800 number available on your website. If your client would like to know where did the client get that number from a Google Adword ad or from Search Engine Optimization efforts. You can automatically change the 1800 number based on the url parameter associated with the link that identifies the original location of the point link.

iMedia Matrix signs strategic partnership with JumpTV for marketing to its Arabic speaking subscribers

iMedia Matrix http://www.imediamatrix.com , has signed an agreement with JumpTV http://www.jumptv.com , the world's leading broadcaster of ethnic television over the Internet to promot all of JumpTV's channels for Arabic Speaking users.

The agreement will allow imediamatrix.com to market all of JumpTV's 220+ channels, with a promotional focus on the company's 37 current Arabic-language channels, including Aljazeera, Future TV, Dubai TV, Mehwar Channel and 2M.

at iMediaMatrix, we are excited to start working with JumpTV on their online marketing campaigns for the Arabic speaking subscribers, Our mission is to provide JumpTV with unparalleled means to reach the global Arabic speaking consumer market.

JumpTV (AIM: JTV) (TSX: JTV) is the world's leading subscription-based broadcaster of ethnic television over the Internet. With over 200 channels from 65+ countries, JumpTV delivers its subscribers full-screen news, sports and entertainment content on a real-time basis from all corners of the globe. JumpTV has subscribers from over 80 countries who view channels on the JumpTV online network via high-speed Internet connections on their home computers, laptops, Internet-enabled televisions and mobile phones.

Technorati Profile

iMedia Matrix Map on frappr

Arabic SEM for Google

Numbers of Arabic users online :
Approximately 28 Million internet users are Arabic Speakers, living in the 22 Arabic countries, while an estimated 14 Million internet users are the first and second generation of Arabic speaking immigrants in the Americas, Europe and Australia. Statistically, in the United States, internet users with Arabic Descents, have higher education level and income level than the national average, making them potential targets for segmented marketing campaigns, which address their needs and respect their differences.

Arabic users’ segmentation for online marketing:
By looking at the search volume of the keywords "Ramadan" in English and its translation "رمضان" in Arabic generated from the United States, we realize that most of those who search for this keyword have an Arabic interface browser; a similar amount of search appears to be from French interface browsers, then a much smaller percentage in English interface Browsers. The reason of having a high percentage of french interface browsers is that most North Africans (Algerians, Tunisians, Moroccans), some Egyptians, Lebanese’s and few Syrians speak French fluently. Addressing those populations with the keywords they are looking for, with the right ads that grabs their attentions, helps creating a substantial amount of conversions that is easily aquired if targeted the right way.

Problems with Google Adwords - Arabic Keywords
When you start creating some of your ads on Google Adwords, it counts the number of characters differently based on the typeset your are using. If you are using Latin, "Ramadan" would be counted as 7 characters. On the other hand, if you are using Arabic, "رمضان" , which is 5 Arabic characters, would be counted as 16 characters by Google. Try it for your self http://www.google.com/search?q=%d8%b1%d9%85%d8%b6%d8%a7%d9%86 which is equivalent to http://www.google.com/search?q=رمضان . Note that the Arabic search term with work correctly if used in Firefox, not in Internet Explorer. The reason is Arabic letters letters are considered 'two-byte' characters, as are characters in languages such as Japanese and Chinese. English characters are 'one-byte' characters. When using 'two-byte' characters,the limits in AdWords text ads are decreased.

Based on Google Adword support team, for Arabic characters, the following length limits apply:

1st Line: 12 characters

2nd Line: 17 characters

3rd Line: 17 characters.

Removing Negative publicity from the first page in Google

"To remove negative publicity from the first pages in Google, Yahoo or MSN means to optimize more than tens of websites to take over the position of those negative sites." iMedia Matrix

Using simple but effective methods, will enable you to view better results in the course of two to three month.

1- Check your current position:
Manually go over every link for the keyword that leads to negative results. Identify the negative publicity and keep a track record of it. You can use webtrend to keep track of the websites position.

2- Benefit from the powerful players:
Use influential and reputable websites to power the keywords you are optimizing for. For example Flickr works like magic with Google. Post relevant pictures on Flickr, comment on your pictures with optimized keywords and link back to your site.

3- Blogs and Social Networks:
Create blogs that mention your keywords that you want to optimize for. Make sure that you update your blogs frequently, and make a sincere effort to identify and communicate with the bloggers in your community. You can make a simple search on Google Blog search engine or Technorati. In addition, you may want to use PubSub, it will keep you posted with the blogs that uses the keywords you are looking for.

4- God Bless Atom and RSS:
Pinging, that is notifying the Blogsphere that you have posted a new post on your blog. A Good tool is Ping-o-matic.com it notifies major blog engines about your new post.

5- Linking to the right players:
Link back from your website to those sites that have a rank of 4/10 and have a positive feedback on your services or products.

6-Motivation:
Have every single person in your company that knows a little bit about websites to follow the above mentioned points. Motivate them. If you don't know how, ask Tom Herman of JumpTV, he's pretty Good at that :)

If you need help or consultation on your current website, we will be glad to help..@ http://www.imediamatrix.com