home

Search Marketing in Israel

Search Laboratory have expertise in Israeli search marketing. There are many important considerations when performing search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing in Israel that go beyond the language, character set and culture. This page provides an insight into some of the issues as well as some important information regarding search marketing in Israeli.

If you would like further information on our Israeli search marketing services and how they can directly help your business, please contact us now for advice.

When we find information related to Israel and search engine marketing we add it here. Some information is common accross all countries, but other useful information you may find about one country or language may not exist for another. Please keep checking back as we update these pages frequently.

Search In Israel

The languages of Israel are Hebrew, Arabic and English, with Hebrew as the official language. Hebrew has its own alphabet and is is written from right-to-left and vowels are always omitted in writing. Because of the omission of vowels, the number of homonyms (same spelling, but different meaning) are much higher in Hebrew than in English (e.g. רפסמ has at least six meanings but the pronunciations are different). On the Internet at least four different encodings of Hebrew are used: Hebrew (ISO logical), Hebrew (ISO visual), Hebrew (Windows) and Hebrew (DOS).

Hebrew is a morphologically complex language. Several layers of prefixes can be added. Numbers and adjectives describing the noun appear in the same gender as the noun.

The major problem for information retrieval are the prefixes, prefixes are so prevalent in the Hebrew language, that any search engine that does not strip these prefixes looses a lot of information. For example, when searching for information on a university )הטיסרבינוא( [universita], pages on which the word university does not appear as a stand-alone word, but only with prefixes (e.g. הטיסרבינואה [hauniversita] - the university or הטיסרבינואב [bauniversita] - in the university) are potentially relevant to the topic, but will not be retrieved if only the exact form of the query term is searched. On the other hand, incorrect identification of the prefixes may also introduce noise to the search results (i.e. when a part of a word is mistakenly considered a prefix: רבדמ could mean desert [midbar], from a thing [midavar] or he talks [medaber]. If the leading letter is stripped off, then the search will include all forms of the word thing and of the verb talk and hardly any results on the intended term desert would be retrieved.

In summary, Hebrew is hard for search engines and marketers because of its complex grammar, the fact that there are so many forms of words and so many meanings for written words, and compounded by the fact that it reads right to left.

Important Israeli Search Engines

Current weekly exposure for the top two engines (July 2006 data) are:

Walla has just announced conversion to a pay per click instead of a pay per view engine. The new bidding system that Walla will be providing to its advertisers is very similar to Google’s adwords and the offered bidding gaps will be at Intervals of 0.25 NIS (~0.06 $).

The number one site in Israel is therefore Google.co.il.

Google opened a business center in Israel in September 2005, managed by Meir Brand, a former senior manager in Microsoft.

Walla.co.il is the biggest content portal in Israel providing directory services, strong search engine, mail and recently even a paying system.

Hotmail/MSN is big in Israel and is the 4th most popular site by exposure. Yahoo is the 8th most popular site overall, but as opposed to Google and MSN, yahoo hadn’t started activity in Israel (Yet) nor in Hebrew , but are very known for their Yahoo! mail and other popular services.

d.co.il is Israel’s Yellow Pages and business directory with a weekly exposure of 11.7%.

Most of the Google searches are conducted on the Israeli Google.co.il version, mainly due the auto geo-targeting redirect that google uses in order to serve the user a local based version. Hebrew sites get about 90% of Google traffic from google.co.il and the rest (10%) from google.com and others.

Need Advice?

Search Laboratory can help you take your message to Israel. This can be using a fully localized site or a small subset of the site to test the market. Either way, with full search marketing to truly realise your on line potential. Please contact us for free advice. Taking the first steps into Israel is easier than you might think.