Japanese SEO,

Developing a fully automated Japanese/English bilingual ecommerce site is very complicated and costly.  For small or medium size businesses, there is a practical alternative.  It is to leave the shopping cart just in English but provide A) a comprehensive shopping guide section customized for the Japanese shoppers written in Japanese, and B) Japanese customer service to answer email inquiries in Japanese.

Here are two examples.

• http://www.hannaandersson.com
• http://www.sigzane.com

Let’s look at Hanna Andersson’s.  It’s one of the best I have seen.
Their Japanese shopping guide includes:

• About Hanna Andersson
• About Hanna’s fabric
• Privacy policy / security
• Return policy
• Back order
• Shipping and custom
• Clothing size charts
• Shoes size charts
• Order status (input order number)
• Online shopping guide
• Error messages
• Payment method
• Q&A
• Free catalog

Both of the sites listed above have a Japanese speaking customer service person who can answer email inquiries in Japanese.  This is a huge plus.  Imagine that you are trying to shop at a site written in Japanese.  If you can write email to them in English, wouldn’t that make you feel much more comfortable to putting your credit number down?  It is not necessary to hire a part-time person for this if you are just testing out the Japan market.  You can outsource it to an email translation service.  We can arrange this for you, so please inquire about it.

Shopping guide and customer service in Japanese (or in another language) are good things to have even if your site is equipped with bilingual shopping cart.  If you can afford it, that would be ideal.  The point here is that with a good shopping guide and customer service in Japanese, a majority of your prospective Japanese customers will be fine in shopping at your site, and you can save by not developing and running a bilingual shopping cart.

Someone asked me which CMS is best to build a basic Japanese / English bilingual ecommerce site that is relatively small in size of up to 50 products or so.  This person was inclined to use Joomla! .  WordPres, Magento, Drupal are among the possible options.

I spent hours researching on the net, only to find that there seems to be no definite answer at this point.  Joomla! does seems to be favored, if you have to pick one.  What surprised me is that I could not find ANY website developer who has experience in building J/E bilingual ecommerce site with Joomla!  I inquired some website developers, but none of them have.  There are some who develop such sites using their own custom made CMS, but I prefer open source CMS because with custom (not open source) CMS, you are at the mercy of the developer in upgrades, cost and support.

Our web design parter, Paul at Tokyo Web Designs says, “Ecommerce is a tremendously complex area, and rather than re-invent the wheel, my goal is to find out which open source platform works best and configure/customize that to match my project requirements.  So far I haven’t found one that I am really satisfied with.”

Maybe it is too early and we don’t have a winner yet for J/E bilingual ecommerce CMS.  I will keep my eyes on this.

A client asked me how they can increase traffic to their website, besides doing SEO (on-site SEO and basic link-building campaign) and running PPC campaigns.  How to increase traffic to your website - that is an ultimate question in the center of internet marketing.  What else can you do?  There is a lot of good articles on the net, and after reading many of them, here are the 5 ideas that I picked for my client for their Japanese website

1.  YouTube
I know, everyone is doing it but neither my client or I have.
Here is a good article.
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/how-to-use-youtube-to-increase-traffic-to-your-website-874385.html

2.  Hold a contest on the site
A classic link bait.  It creates a reason for potential customers - who may not purchase immediately - to visit your site.  Entering must to be easy and fun.  Prizes need to be attractive but not necessarily expensive.  Promotional goods such as logo T-shirt are good ones.  Local finds are possibilities.  Cross-promotion with a partner might work.

3.  Make lists
Make lists around your keywords.  For example, top 10 tips in buying (your product).  Top 5, 10, or any number will do.  When compiled, a list becomes a good resource on the subject.  Added on your blog, lists tend to rank well with search engines.

4.  Participate in forums
Most popular forum sites in Japan include: Yahoo Chiebukuro, Hatena and Oshiete Goo.  There may be other forum sites specific to your subject.  Be helpful and place no blatant advertisement.

5.  Comment on other blogs
To blog search, use Yahoo! Japan (Technorati Japan dissolved).

The last two are best handled by in-house staff.  It’s a labor intensive but sure way to add links on relevant content to your website.

If you want to sell your products or service to the people in Japan, and want them to fill in their names and addresss in your form, you might want to know the following.

Address is written from largest units to smallest units of areas, with the addressee’s name last of all. For example:
〒100-8799
東京都千代田区丸の内2丁目7番2号
田中　一夫

〒100-8799
Tokyo-to Chiyoda-ku Marunouchi 2-7-2
Tanaka Kazuo

Most people in Japan know to write it in reverse order when writing in English alphabet.

Kazuo Tanaka
2-7-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 100-8799

Some addresses are quite long:

• Azachuodai 21-14, Oaza-ottozawa, Okuma-machi, Hutaba-gun, Fukushima 979-1301
• Oaza-hamanomiya 361-1, Nachikatsuura-cho, Higashimuro-gun, Wakayama 649-5314
• Osaka-cho 384, Karasuma-dori-Gojo-sagaru, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto 600-8418

That being said, I think it is probably the best to keep your form simple and if possible, provide a sample of how to fill in.  You should ask to use English alphabet if no sample is provided.  Include:

• (full) name 氏名
• address (apartment /building name, room number)　住所（マンション・アパート名・部屋番号）
• address (street name and number)　住所（町名・番地）
• address (city, ward)　住所（市町村郡）
• prefecture　都道府県
• postal code　郵便番号

We are happy to announce a partnership with Tokyo Web Designs for Japanese web design, CMS website development, SEO, search marketing, translation and copy writing projects.

The company is based in Tokyo, Japan and provides English and Japanese web solutions to local and foreign businesses targeting the Japanese market.

Tokyo Web Designs have asked us to assist with all their Japanese language support services.

We look forward to helping them!

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.