Japanese SEO,

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.