Japanese SEO,

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.