How to enter in the Japanese market

What is mandatory?

[wolfy]

Hi to all!!!
Any of you have tried to market in Japan?
I have bought a .jp domain, hosted the domain in Japan, of course translated the site in Japan and now I'm trying to submit it to search engines and directories.
One thing is sure: you need a Japanese mother tongue to work for it.
Apart from this did any of you have experiences with Japanese search engines and directories? Do you know how they work? Do you have a list of the most important ones?

I hope you'll answer some of my questions!!

Bye

Wolfy

[keikei]

Here is an overview of search engine markets in Japan.

market share / name
1. Yahoo! Japan (self-directory + Google)
2. MSN (self-directory + Looksmart)
3. Google (+ODP)
4. Goo/Infoseek Japan/Fresheye (all have its own engine)
5. Japanese ISP portals (nifty/biglobe/sonet - all using Google)
6. Lycos Japan (Wisenut) / Excite Japan (Google)

Basically what you have to do is:

1. pay a small free to submit the site to Yahoo! Japan and Looksmart Japan (if you don't want to pay just submit the site to Yahoo! Japan as usuall...10% success rate though)
2. submit the site to Wisenut and Lycos Japan's directory
3. submit the site to Infoseek Japan / Goo / Fresheye
4. submit the site to Google

Google and Google-powered sites (Excite and ISPs) cover over 70% of searches in Japan (I cannot give you any official data but this is a common understanding). So the key is getting the higher rankings for major Japanese keywords in Google. The forumula is the same as you do the work in the US.

The fact is that SEO is still a rarely used emarketing tactic in Japan so you have a much better chance to get a higher ranking... For instance I'm a pro SEO expert in Japan and have achieved top 3 positions in Google for over 50 single keywords in the top 200 most-searched keywords, for over 30 clients. And this is generating lots of traffic and sales to my clients! I must admit SEO can give you an easy entry to the rather tough Japanese market.

[keikei]

Forgot to tell you but most engines do sell keyword-ads so you might contact them if that's your interest. There is no PPC engine like Overture in Japan yet (although it's coming soon...).

If buying keywords in your interest there is a company called iRep (www.irep.co.jp) who is a leading keyword ad agency covering all Japanese major sites except MSN (which is exclusively handled by DoubleClick Japan). I'm not affiliated to them in any way, but they may be able to give you some insight regarding how many those keywords in your interest are searched in Japan...

[bill]

wolfy I think keikei did a pretty good job of summarizing the market. There are several posts in this forum that talk about these search engines and directories in Japan, but like many other markets worldwide Google has been dominating the SE scene for a while now.

Just for your information a Business Express listing on Yahoo Japan is currently ¥52,500 (almost $400 US) and promises a review in 7 business days. Yahoo Japan's fee is a one-time payment, unlike Yahoo in the US where it has become an annual fee.

LookSmart Japan claims to have access to 70% of Internet users in Japan (unlike Google's 70% eh? :)). They currently show directory results on MSN, Excite, BIGLOBE, ISIZE, DION, ODN, So-Net and a few others. Their price for an Express listing is currently ¥32,000 (about $243 US).

It's not actually necessary to physically host a .jp domain in Japan...however it is somewhat helpful to have a .jp name. This again is not a necessity as there are plenty of .com and .net sites in Japanese that rank well. It wasn't until 2001 that top level .jp names were available for registration...before this the only alternative was to go through the archaic set of rules, regulations and restrictions that still govern the .co.jp type names in Japan.

Since you seem to have the Japanese content down, I'd have to say that there aren't many differences between Japanese and English SEO. Most of your tried and true methods learned for Google in the US or Europe will generally apply to Google Japan and most of the other engines. You've got the difficult part done ;)

[keikei]

Thanx for following up Bill.

I agree that having .jp domain is not much of a necessity to gain top rankings in Japanese SEs.

This will likely remain since most Japanese sites have .com / .net domains and those sites tend to be popular / huge Japanese sites, for most of those sites were initially built before .jp domains became available.

[wolfy]

Wow!!
Thanks for your explanations,
now I've understood that I've already made all that you suggest me but it doesn't work as I hoped!!
In fact I've made the submission with Loooksmart, I'm very well listed in the right ODP category, I made the submissions to Goo/Infoseek Japan/Fresheye
but my logs don't show me nice results !!
Well may be I'll pay the submission fee to Yahoo since they didn't list me after more than 30 days. May be the problem is in site's pages that are not well optimized.
One more question: do you think the robots.txt is necessary for jp spiders? or the meta tags are enough?

Thanks guys!
Wolfy

[keikei]

>do you think the robots.txt is necessary for jp spiders? or the meta tags are enough?

I don't really pay much attention robots.txt... Googlbot works great for all my Japanese sites. The same for others...except you have to submit each page manually to Infoseek Japan (can't believe this old engine still exist ;p ).

Also meta tags are getting useless nowadays... as most engines ignore metatags. But again, Infoseek Japan does care it and use what's there on the SERP listing, so you might want to put it on the page anyway. It might not help you much, but it does not hurt you :)

Once you have a well-SEOed web site, the best advice I can give you is trying to obtain links from related Japanese sites! There are lots of private websites in Japan so I'm sure you can get a fair amount of links if you spend some time to work on it...

[bill]

do you think the robots.txt is necessary for jp spiders? or the meta tags are enough?

I think you may have confused the purpose of the robots.txt file. It's always good to look over Brett's Fear and Loathing of Robots.txt [webmasterworld.com] post to refresh yourself. It has always been my understanding that robots.txt is used to exclude robots from areas of your site...not to include them.

As for meta tags, the keywords tag is next to useless and is considered by only a few of the less important Japanese engines now. There are enough that will use your description tag, so it's still worthwhile to put a little time into that...and of course you wouldn't want to forget the title tag, but you knew that already ;)

I'd be interested to know why you aren't getting results wolfy. Do you think it's your site? Could it just be your targeted keywords? Is it the market you're targeting?