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.

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?

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.

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.