Japanese SEO,

Someone asked me what is the best way to build a basic Japanese ecommerce site for English speaking shop owner. So again I spent some hours and learned something new. All well known open source CMS like WordPress, Magento, Zen cart are developed in English, then translated into other languages. But there is a relatively new open source ecommerce CMS called EC-CUBE that is developed from scratch by Japanese programmers because they wanted a CMS that is customized to Japan ecommerce out of the box.

What sets EC-CUBE apart from other CMS for Japan market is it’s capability to handle mobile phones - specifically, DoCoMo, SoftBank and au. From young to old, everyone in Japan surf the Internet using their cell phone, and to many of them their phone is the main tool to surf the net.

In addition, from what I read, EC-CUBE is suitable for small ecommerce site, relatively inexpensive, and has easy-to-use back-end. The drawback - for non Japanese speaking businesses - is that the back-end interface is in Japanese. Of course, it is technically possible to turn it to English, but no one seems to have done it yet.

The principles of SEO are the same regardless of language.  However, simply translating a site, keywords and meta tags into another language often results in poor SEO, unless the translator is SEO trained and capable of writing SEO copy. Different language means different society. A language reflects culture, history, way of thinking, life style, and trends of a society. Language evolves and word usage changes faster than dictionaries catch up, especially in areas like technology and fashion. So it is critical to do a keyword research and study competitors sites in the language you are translating your site into before writing copy in that language. But if you have already translated your site into Japanese and not sure if the translation is good in terms of SEO, we are happy to take a look and see if it needs fixing.

One thing particular about Japan SEO is that you need to SEO your site both for Yahoo Japan and Google, since Yahoo Japan is used more than Google in Japan. Unlike other international branches of Yahoo, Yahoo Japan is an independent company owned by Tokyo based Softbank.  It offers most features of Yahoo but also carries its own programs and features.

I added two recent Japanese SEO projects to my portfolio. I am happy to say that both sites are ranked very high. The two cases – a site for an English language school in Japan and a vacation-rental booking site - were similar from my perspective. Both sites were nowhere to be found on SERP (search engine result page) due to lack of basic SEO elements such as title tags written in Japanese.

On both sites, I re-organized the content and overhauled the navigation menu for search engine bots and for the human users. I also wrote and added copy, again for bots and human users, then I fortified the pages with proper tags, etc.

As of today (5/7/2010), and with the keywords the site owners targeted, the language school’s site is ranked number 1 (!) on the first page with Yahoo Japan, and listed on the second page with Google.co.jp. The vacation-rental site is also on the first page with Yahoo Japan but it’s on the 4th page with Google.co.jp.

Why are these sites ranked lower with Google? First thing that comes to my mind is incoming links. Both of these sites do not have many links form other sites, and maybe Google is more serious about incoming links than Yahoo Japan is. Could it be so?