“I just wanted something more. So I took a risk.” Mrs. Hanan Saab

Muscat, Oman. April 26, 2010. Women in Business Conference 2010. Female enterprise executives and entrepreneurs gathered on a fragrant sunny day at the Intercontinental Hotel, in Oman’s capital city. The topic? Changing the Face of Business – Women as an Economic Force.

One of the most inspiring talks today came from Mrs. Hanan Saab from Beirut Lebanon. She talks of the challenges she overcame creating a pharmaceutical business from scratch amidst the political turmoil of Lebanon in the 80s and 90s, all while raising three children.

Mrs. Saab is a self-described 3rd generation pharmacist. Her grandfather graduated in 1905 from the American University of Beirut…. as did his son…. as did his daughter, our very own Mrs. Saab standing before us in a crowded auditorium filled with aspiring and inspiring Omani business women.

“In 1976 political insurgents burned the our family business.”  The business of three generations of pharmacists who were there to provide aid to their community.

Lebanon is a country with 4 million inhabitants, and 15 million immigrants who live outside the country. In the face of this challenge, Mrs. Saab chose to stand her ground, Lebanese ground, a pattern she unwaveringly continues.  In 1983, she was forced to move 8 times, when she was pregnant with her second daughter, as bombs and cannons forced her family into underground shelters for protection. She stood again by her decision to remain in her home country.

In 1985 she joined the American University of Beirut Hospital Pharmacy. The years spanning 1985 to 1990 were the toughest period of the civil war in Beirut. ““What about our children?” her husband would ask. “I have a duty she says, as a mother, but as a caregiver. Who knows who will need medication at this almost full hospital? What if there is someone I know amongst the casualties?”   She stood by her decision to remain in Lebanon. Shortly after this statement, she recognized one of the bombing victims and treated none other than her very husband’s niece.

An eternal optimist, Mrs. Saab lingers not on the pain, but on the personal and professional growth these experiences gave her.  “I continued to develop conflict resolution and bettered my communication skills. One day the Vice President of the American University Hospital (AHU) at the time;  asked me to start a pharmaceutical purchasing department.”. Witnessing all the untreated pain around her (“Go home, we really can’t do anything more for you. It is untreatable.”), she envisioned an opportunity to start a business in pain management and oncology medications. “My goal was to improve patient care with controlled medication.”

Now consider this sequence of challenges Mrs. Saab faced as she tried to get a fledgling business of the ground. Your challenges may not seem as mountainous as compared to this terrain.

Finding partners was difficult. Lebanon was considered high risk due to “recurrent if not ongoing political conflict. No one was coming, so in order for me to create partnerships, I had to travel as people were concerned and afraid to make the investment.”

Connecting with partners was crippled by poor infrastructure. “To get a telephone line in Beirut we had to physically bring in wires from Cyprus.”

High interest rates plagued the dragging economy and made getting a loan a challenge. Add to this laws prohibiting her to start business without permission from her husband (In 1994 these laws were abolished). To get a loan, the Bank requested collateral from both herself and her husband that was 10 times the value requested. In order to travel, she needed permission from her husband. In order to open an account for her own children, she needed permissions from her husband. She got those permissions. Note that this was abolished in 2009.

“I was just a pharmacist. To be an entrepreneur there are many other skills you need – finance, human resources.”

Yet she persevered and obtained a license in 1990 and commercialized the company in 1992. 

“I own 90% of my company and my husband owns 10%”.  (At this, the hushed auditorium in Oman suddenly bursts into spontaneous applause).

And what did she decide to take to market as her first product?

Morphine.

“No one wanted to bring this in. Everyone thought I was crazy. ‘You have a very good position in AUH, securing the education of children. What more do you want?’”

“I just wanted something more. So I took a risk.”

The risk paid off. “Either the market drives you, or you be proactive,” she paraphrases a quote.  “In 2000, we opened up to other territories in our region – Jordan, then other regions in the Gulf followed. Dubai, Qatar, Egypt… We became the exclusive distributor for 22 companies and a major player in the field of oncology.”

“We have 40 employees and 78% are ladies,” Mrs. Saab announces, her next words nearly lost after thunderous applause from the Omani business ladies. “…and these ladies occupy our highest administrative positions. We give employees who are mothers flexible hours, extended maternity leaves, and the flexibility to nurse their babies in a nursery that faces our office. – For as long as they want. The health of our babies is number one.”

“We are a small company and at the same time, a well bonded family.”

She concludes, “Even if they say no, try diplomatically to find a way around the obstacle. Never give up. If you fail, make sure to learn. And always, help one another.”

Mrs. Hanan Saab is is also one of twelve architects behind the Lebanese League of Women in Business (LLWB), and a founding member of the Middle East North African Business Women’s network, whose mission is to “Take the Lead And Succeed”.

Last Modified: 9/12/2010

In this post, we will explore some tips and tricks to improve the search relevancy and page ranking for your custom blog content.  This is one article in an ever-growing series : Blogging 101 : Behind the Scenes at SlingAlibi.com. The goal of this series is to provide a step by step guide that you can use as a checklist to host your own website with a customized blog engine.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are several techniques you can use to optimize your site for better search relevancy.  Please feel free to use this as an a la carte checklist of options to configure your website.

1. Get an account at Digg. Add a Plugin for Digg into Livewriter – This puts a link to Digg in each of your posts.This will allow people to stack rank your content as valuable or relevant for the Digg aggregator.

2. For .NET Application Development related content, get an account at DotNetShoutout and DZone. Both allow you to submit links to your most important posts and people can vote on them, bumping them up on top 10 lists.  Optionally, you can tag your posts with little links that allow your readers to cast their vote directly from  your posts. This could be tacky, so verdict is still out on whether this is a best practice. I am experimenting with a DotNetKicks link on some of my posts.
3. Likewise, get an account at DotNetKicks. Add the LiveWriter plug in for DotNetKicks, assuming you are writing about software development with .NET.
4. Submit your blog to Technorati. Just join, membership is free. Then you can claim your blog by creating a “fake” post with a key that Technorati provides. Once they reach out and touch your post, they’ll authorize the claim. You can track the status of your claim directly on their website. Once your claim has been approved, you will be able edit your settings and see your ranking amongst the -rati. Check out my ranking. I am sure it is 3M out of 3M: Once you are set up you can use the Ping button to have Technorati search your site for new content. You can automate this by entering this into the settings for your blogging engine, in my case, I can go into control panel in BlogEngine.NET and set up the automatic ping service. This establishes a handshake between my blog server and Technorati.
5. Submit your site to crawlers and blog indexers, such as Blogged.
6. Connect to delicious – sign in – drop in tags into your blog. Tags are basically the equivalent of keywords from way back in the 90s. Keywords provide descriptive terms in the META of a page. Search engine crawlers examine the meta of a page to determine the best place to index the page. More keywords is not necessarily better. Be very selective with which keywords you choose. Read the section on SEO for more information.
7. Submit your blog to search engines. There are tons of techniques on how to this.  For starters, you can hit the big 3:
• URL Submission – Bing
• Add your URL to Google
• Yahoo! Submit Your Site This posting is a good reference guide on submitting to search engines. It’s a good idea to wait until you get a fair amount of entries in each of your categories so the crawlers don’t miss indexing a particular category due to its sparse population. A good rule of thumb is 15-20 items per category.
8. Run a free search simulator test on your site to see how a search engine views your site. This will help tweak your content to be more search friendly.  So when I ran one, I quickly realized the Spider wasn’t able to crawl my links. I realized that I hadn’t properly set the sitemap property in the robots.txt file to point to the sitemap file. Also, I realized that by web hoster has a security guard that is turned on by default. You can turn down from STRONG to MEDIUM inside the Control Panel. Once I did that, I definitely got a slew of results from the spider.
9. Separate your UI markup code from your content. Look at your source. Are you using the FONT tag? Switch those out & use Cascading Style Sheets for setting your UI attributes.
10. Don’t use too many H1 tags (this page is incredibly guilty of it) it confuses the search engines with TMI. That’s probably why I am going to have to break this page up into at least a dozen posts. But don’t get annoying with how granular you are with your site. Personally, I don’t enjoy skipping around between pages for tiny crumbs of information. It’s a balance, not too dense (like this page is in its current form) where ADD people can’t deal and not too sparse, where fast readers are bored and flit away.
11. Always use ALT text with your images. Crawlers can’t “read” images.
12. Get listed in DMOZ – a human maintained yellow pages of the web. This will link you up with other partner sites, such as AOL, AltaVista, Google, etc.
13. (optional) Likewise register with the paid service directories, such as Yahoo and business.com directories, but this is not free. ($299/ and $199 / year respectively).
14. Run a free web site grader against your main page for more tips like this. IT’s great to have a role model in mind when you run this search. Basically do a little investigating and find a blog that’s something similar to what you’d like in reach. I opted to go with the the people who helped me tremendously getting set up here, as a means to understand what a successful site looks like. As you can see I have a long, long way to go:
     
    
    
    
15. Don’t create hyperlinks that are called “here” or “this”.  Apparently poor anchor texts do not allow search engine crawlers to properly categorize your site.
16. Don’t have any broken links. This is an obvious one, but good to remember for regular monthly maintenance.  You can use a validation spider to clean your site up. I plan to get rid of my 2nd subdomain blogs.slingalibi.com to avoid confusion and keep my site focused on one domain, so I’ll definitely be running this tool in the next day or so.  But I did a quick run through, not expecting to find much after less than a week of being up, and (er) I am guilty. The crawler crawled for several minutes: And then it told me I had 11 bad links (and I haven’t even killed my subdomain yet!) So most likely 1/month is not frequent enough:

     

17. How you do redirection is also very critical for SEO. (ASP.NET 4.0 has new features to support 301 redirection – which signifies a permanent redirection – much better for search crawlers.). Why do you want redirects? To make things nice and neat with setting subdomains. For example, I have a redirect from about.slingalibi.com to an ASPX file sitting deep inside a folder.  When it comes to your own personal ASP.NET code, you should consider the new routing features of ASP.NET 4.0. 
18. Leverage the Text Template Add In if you are using Live Writer. This will make it easy for you to automatically insert links to chicklets so you don’t have to manually add the line of code for each of your chicklets, like the tweet me script:

       1: <p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>&#160; </p>

In this profile, we will meet Dr. Marina Bers, an associate professor at Tufts both in Computer Science and Child Development Departments at Tufts University. She is also a scientific research associate at Boston Children's Hospital. We will learn about how the work she does helps reverse the trend of a decline in female technologists.

This is one profile of many in the Who’s Who in Women in Technology (WiT). The profiles will range from young generations to old, from academic to corporate, from non-for-profit to entrepreneurs – all with one thing in common – they are role models and people who make a positive influence to inspiring girls and women to pursue STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Math) related disciplines and industries.

During the WomenBuildtour last year, we asked men and women across the US: what can large software companies like Microsoft do to help inspire girls and women to become scientists and engineers? We heard many things, one of which was a lack of role models in the STEM disciplines. This series hopes surface the men and women who are making a difference with WiT.

Meet Dr. Marina Bers

In June 2009 I delivered a talk on WomenBuild at a LEGO Symposium at Tufts University, and had an opportunity to meet with Dr. Marina Bers and learn about her WiT (Women In Technology) aligned programs. Dr. Bers directs the Developmental technologies (http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/) group, working within doctoral students who in turn work young children to teach them computer science concepts at an early age.  

In 2005, Bers was invited to the White House in Washington DC to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers(PECASE), the highest honor given by the U.S. government to outstanding investigators at the early stages of their careers.  Truly, she is the ultimate role model for aspiring female scientists and technologists.

We spoke of the user of LEGO and bricks as learning tools to build tangible programming concepts skills, especially for young females.    She gave me a tour of her research lab, which was comprised of models built in the physical space, which represented the models that we build in the computer science space.

Software design and architecture is sometimes hard to visualize or imagine. If you aren’t a developer, can you picture an object model? Probably not.  With the teachings of Dr. Bers, hopefully this will change and people can visualize object models, just like they can visualize the double helix of DNA.  Dr. Bers makes modeling accessible by using physical componentized tools, such as LEGO bricks to allow children to touch, imagine and build.  The skills they learn here are exactly the skills they will need for a career in software development or engineering.

Why is she a Women in Technology influential?

Dr. Bers focuses on teaching young children programming concepts using tools and toys that are comfortable and familiar to children. She has developed a programs called Tangible Kindergarten, that enables children to learn programming concepts, such as sequencing, by using wooden blocks marked with LEGO Mindstorm-esque visual symbols that cue for movement by a sensor. If you look at the blocks, this is exactly the model for teaching sequential instructional programming.

Unifying the Physical & Virtual Worlds for Learning

Consider a bit of pseudo code that maps to these blocks:

The simple instructions given on the block map respectively to BASIC and .NET code. For example, Begin is analogous to the CLS command in DOS or BASIC, which means Clear Screen.  In ASP.NET, every web page is created with a Page_Init event, just like the simple Begin. In fact each of these commands in the blocks completely relate to object oriented concepts!

1. Begin  CLS / Clear Screen / Page_Init / Initialize
2. Shake Fire Event (Shake )
3. Music BEEP / myMultiMedia.Start / myMusic.Play
4. Forward  GOTO / Call MySubRoutine / result = MyFunction

There is a synergy between her programming learning mechanisms to help children learn .NET as a potential development platform. These concepts certainly can go beyond professors teachers and can be easily introduced as learning tools for parents in professional world. Dr. Bers has also been an avid proponent of the virtual world community (from way back in 1997 during the ActiveWorld era), again yet another way Dr. Bers is combining the virtual world with the physical. 

So what does this mean for you?

I spent some time in my office (ahem) to read Dr. Ber’s book and there is something in it for both teacher, parent as well as professionals interested in developing new talent.  If you personally know of any children, especially females, who have a proclivity towards STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) disciplines, programs such as Dr. Bers can hep develop those innate talents into skills that the child can use in the professional world. LEGO products, such as WeDo and Mindstorms, can help facilitate those learnings in a fun way.  Read Dr. Ber’s book, Block to Robots to learn more about how you can work with your local faculty or even teach a a parent, to help bring technology concepts to early childhood in a fun, engaging and interactive way. 

And for those of you who are looking to study or pursue a career in STEM, know that there are people like Dr.Bers who combine imagination and science, to make a difference in the world. You can too!

Join the discussion, and subscribe to be notified of future WomenBuild events!