Japanese SEO,

This is part 2 of my response to this question:
“If I produce a website and have it translated to Japanese, can you optimize my site for search engines in Japan?

Now let’s discuss translation.
Apparently search engines depend on what they can read on your site to evaluate and rank the site.  But most translators don’t think about it.  They don’t think about what words people would use on Google or Yahoo to search for the products or services that your site offers.  They don’t study the competitors sites or PPC/ Adwords ads to learn the prevalent words people use. For example, if you are selling cashmere stoles, should you call them stoles or wraps? Should the description be luxury, soft or silky? Should it say made in Scotland or Scottish?

Doing a keyword research and using the right words in the copy of your website is critical. So it is a good idea to do a keyword research first (in the target language), then translate using the right words and phrases. The result is search-query oriented text.  

So here is my suggestion. When you find a candidate translator, ask if he or she offers keyword research. If not, try ask if he/she can study your competitors’ sites and provide you a glossary specific to your products and services (even if you can’t read the translated words).

Also, ask the translator to produce a good copy, not a word to word translation.  Request a sample translation for a few sentences from your website and have it reviewed by someone capable of reading and writing Japanese.

Someone asked me:
If I produce a website and have it translated to Japanese then how confident are you that you can optimize
the site for search engines in Japan?

Here is my response:
The best way to SEO your website is to do it from the very beginning when planning and selecting a developer and a translator. Let’s first discuss selecting a developer.

If you choose a SEO minded developer, then your on-site SEO is almost halfway done. You just need to keep on building your content.

On the other hand, if your developer is not SEO minded, SEO-ing the website they develop can be restricted because of the way it is built.  For example, a tag may be missing in the code but it can not be added. Besides these limitations, fixing what is done is not efficient in terms of time and cost.

So how to select a good developer?  Like in other things, the more knowledge you have, the more questions you can ask to to pick the right one. There are endless supply or literature on SEO on the Internet. But if you are not in SEO business, that can be overwhelming. If you are new to SEO and need to find a good developer, here is what you can do to quickly screen out the least desirable ones.

1. Download Google’s “search-engine-optimization-starter-guide” and read about “page titles” and “description tag”:
   
   http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
2. Find the portfolio page on the developer’s site . If a portfolio is not available, ask for URLs of their past work.
3. Check the “page titles” and “description tag” on their past work against Google’s starter guide.

If you are interested in learning more about SEO, here is a good place to start.