Japanese SEO,

If you wish to sell your products to Japan via your online shop, I suggest you to look into accepting JCB card.

JCB is a Japan based credit card.  Although not well known outside the country, it is the most widely accepted credit card in the country.  Some consumers in Japan – particularly the younger ones who haven’t traveled much abroad - only own JCB card.

To cater to this population, many airlines and hotels accept the card, and so do the retailers in tourist destinations such as Hawaii and Korea where the Japanese love to travel to.

wikipedia entry for JCB card

Another payment method that you might want to consider is money order issued by Japan Post Bank.  Established in 2007 as a result of privatization of government owned Japan Post, Japan Post Bank  is the largest bank in Japan and one of the largest in the world in terms of total assets.

Japan Post Bank’s money order can be made either to your bank account or street address.  Bank account maybe a better choice because it’s faster (4-6 days vs. 5-12 days estimated) and it involves no fee on your end.  With the money order made to your street address, on the other hand, you might have to pay a fee when depositing the money order, depending on your bank.

The drawback of money order made to your bank account is that if you don’t want to post your bank account number on your website, you need to correspond it to your customer.

Weak dollar aids exports.  One of our clients who manufactures and sells surfboards has been seeing increased sales from Japan as yen remains strong against dollar.  If you are an online retailer and haven’t shipped your products to overseas, here are some links that might interest you:

U.S. Postal Service – Postage Calculator

FedEx – International Shipping Rate calculator

Amazon.com’s information page on “Shipping rates and times to Japan”

It appears that USPS is widely used for shipping a variety of consumer products.  The surfboard company mentioned above, however, uses Sagawa Express and Yamato Transport for shipping their surfboards because surfboards are easily damaged during shipping if not packaged well, and the manufacturer found Sagawa and Yamato provide the best service.

Sagawa Express

Yamato Transport U.S.A.

At the end of the year, lists of various top-10  -or 20 or 30 - hit-products-in-2008 are published in Japan and some of these products are unique.  One such product is a stamp called “Keshipon” that makes printed letters illegible. You use it to stamp over your name and address on DMs and catalogues to better protect your privacy before discarding them.

Another unique hit product is called “Shower Clean Suite.”  Yes, it’s men’s business suits that you can wash and clean in the shower.

SEO for a Japanese website is not the same as SEO an English website because Yahoo! Japan is the most dominant search engine in Japan.  In the U.S. or any other country where the majority use Google, SEO means structuring your website so that Google will give it a high ranking.  In contrast, SEO is not successful in Japan if your website does not rank high on Yahoo! Japan.

One can argue that the basic principles for all search engines should be the same - to show the most informative and relevant websites for each search query, and therefore SEO in various countries or languages should be more similar than different.

Let’s take a look at how similar or different the search results are between Yahoo! Japan and Google’s Japanese version.  I searched for “Hawaii golf” (in Japanese) and compared the lists of the top 10 websites provided by the two Japanese search engines.  Only 3 out of 10 websites appear on both lists.  A search for “Kilauea volcano” resulted in 4 out of 10 being on both lists.  A search for “Bare Minerals”, 4 out of 10.  I think that such a substantial difference calls for Japanese SEO providers to give specific attention to Yahoo! Japan’s algorithm.

.jp domain
Is a .jp domain better than .com or .net if your site targets Japanese people? I have had doubts about this and finally have come across some information that I think is reliable.

An organization called Seomoz conducted a survey of 37 SEO experts in the U.S. about Google’s ranking factors.  The results, published in April 2008, can be found at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

One of the factors surveyed is the TLD Extension of the site name  (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc.)  TLD stands for top level domain. You can read the U.S. experts’ comments at  http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#cat3 .  Note that the factor discussed here is not just country-specific TLD extensions such as .ca or .jp. but also different generic or global TLD extensions such as com,  edu, gov, net and info.

To follow up on this in Japan, where Yahoo is the number one search engine, a company called Impress R&D did a similar survey in January 2008. It polled the opinions of 22 SEO top experts in Japan about Yahoo! Japan.  Yahoo! Japan has its own algorithm that  differs from that of Yahoo in the U.S.  The results of this survey, along with the original U.S. one, are published on the web at http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/l/2463 - in Japanese.  In short, these SEO professionals haven’t found much to talk about the issue of country specific vs. generic extensions.  That, to me, is an indication that having a .jp domain does not give a noticeable advantage in SEO ranking for your site.

It appears that the SEO professionals, both American and Japanese, tend to agree that .gov and .edu are given some weight by the search engines.  They also seem to agree that the TLD extension by itself is not a big factor except in the case of .gov and .edu,

There is only one comment made by a Japanese SEO expert about country-specific extensions.  It concerns Yahoo! Japan. The comment is, “If a site is providing services in Japan and has another country’s extension, (such as .ca, .kr, .uk) it would receive a lower ranking.”  That seems to be logical.  No one has commented in regards to whether a country specific extension such as .jp is better than a generic TLD such as  .com and .net.

One of the guidelines that Yahoo Japan lays out for its Business Express is that a translated website must provide sufficient content and all necessary information in Japanese.  If the website is a shopping site, a Japanese user should be able to shop without needing to read English.  In addition, company information, its return policy, and payment and shipping information must be provided in Japanese.

What about external links to a booking service for a hotel, golf course, etc., that is only in English?  It is okay to place such links on your Japanese site, as long as:  (1) It is clearly noted that the link leads to an English site.  (2)  Your site has sufficient price information in Japanese and does not depend on the linked site for it.  (3) Your site provides alternative ways to book, such as by e-mail, by telephone, etc.

What Yahoo Japan considers to be sufficient is subjective. However, in my experience, Yahoo Japan is more demanding than one would expect.  Recently, I submitted a hotel site and Yahoo Japan pointed out that the package price information was lacking.  So I learned a lesson; don’t expect Yahoo Japan to overlook anything.

Yahoo Japan (who owns Overture Japan) is displaying NO ads with certain keywords.  Such words include the following: gun, tobacco, gamble, cancer, quit smoking, Rogain, hair growing, dieting, esthetic, wrinkle removing, spots removing, cellulite, liposuction and plastic surgery.  There may be more, but you get the idea.

A search for “casino” found four ads.  Three of them refer to Las Vegas and one to US.  There were no ads for online-casinos.

I tried to make one ad for “quit smoking” to see what happens.  Almost at the end of the setup process, a message in red letters popped out, saying that my ads are not displayed.  The message listed four possible causes, but none of them were applicable to my setup.

So Yahoo Japan is blocking certain keywords to be used in the PPC ads.  If your products or services are related to these words, then you have to depend solely on organic ranking with Yahoo Japan.  With Google, however, you still can run PPC ads with Adwords.

I am happy that I have just completed registering a client’s site to Yahoo Japan because it took quite a bit of work. Yahoo didn’t approve our first attempt to register the site, saying that the payment method and cancelation policy for the site’s online-booking are not provided or not easily found. Yahoo also pointed out that a description of one of the products appears in English. So, I helped my client to fix the problems, re-submitted the site, and received an approval. I am relieved because Yahoo gives you only one chance to re-submit a site without an additional charge and it must be done within 30 days.

I checked Yahoo Japan’s website to see if what they pointed out about my client’s site is listed in the guidelines. It wasn’t, but at least I know this now and that’s good.

This registration process took several hours of my time, my client’s time, and Yahoo Japan’s time. I think that it’s amazing that Yahoo Japan enforces such strict registration guidelines. Yahoo Japan must consider this effort at enforcement to pay off in the long run. When a site is “Yahoo registered, ” it means something, therefore more people pay to register their sites, and Yahoo’s brand becomes stronger.

Anyway, I need to remember that Yahoo Japan’s registration involves a serious review of one’s website.

Nissan has a sports coupe called Datsun 280Z or Fair Lady Z. Fair
Lady Z was the original name given to the car when it was
developed in Japan. Someone probably advised Nissan that, to the
Americans, the name Fair Lady Z doesn’t match the car. So the company picked
a different name for the U.S. market.

This illustrates a potential pitfall in naming a product or service in another language. If
you are translating your website into another language, it is worth consulting someone to avoid this “Fair Lady” pitfall. (By the way, “Fair Lady Z” sounds fine to the Japanese people’s ears as a name of a sports coupe, mainly because it is in English. It is similar to any French words sounding sophisticated to the Americans. )

When you search using the same words in Yahoo Japan (Yahoo) and
Google Japanese (Google), the results are quite different. It seems
that the greatest difference is that Yahoo gives more weight to
business sites than to community sites.

For example, when I searched for “Hawaii golf,” (in Japanese) I found that the top 4 sites on Yahoo’s top results page are business sites. The 5th ranking site is a a guide book type community site. On Google, in contrast, thefirst 3 sites listed are community sites.

This difference is probably a reflection of Yahoo’s “Business
Express.” For charging a fee of nearly $500 (or even double in
some cases) for registering a site, it ought to provide some ranking boost in return!

For businesses, it’s a good thing that Yahoo Japan is the most used
search engine in Japan. For Japanese language search users, it’s good to be aware of this difference between Yahoo and Google. If you are looking for products and services, use Yahoo. Otherwise, check out Google as well.