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Forgive my naievity, but I have a question that is either common place in the SEO game or has already been asked in a previous post. I found a few posts that came close, but neither of them(possibly due to my lack of understanding) quite answered my question in a way that I could easily understand.
I've been trusted with the daunting task of optimizing a Japanese/English language website and I've recently found some snippets of information that suggest that the body text, Title and Header information for any given website should not be written in ASCII code if you plan on having it rank well among Japanese search engines, but rather in unicode/double bite unicode.
Forgive me again, but I know so little about this subject that I don't even know the proper question to ask.
I guess for starters I'd like to hear from anyone that can lend their thoughts on the proper format for writing an optimized Japanese page/website and then hopefully I can generate some specific questions to ask everyone.
Many Thanks
Although Unicode may be the next big thing, I've been told by several programmers within the last month that if you're making your site today it's still a bit early to make the switch to Unicode for Japanese sites. I didn't press for technical specifics, but according to them, most professional web application and site designers are still told not to use Unicode for general site encoding. It seems that there are still some browser and other compatibility problems that exist. When I asked them how long it would be until Unicode would be ready for prime-time in Japanese sites, they told me anywhere from 1-5 years.
On the other hand, there are several members here who claim to have had no problems whatsoever using Unicode on their Japanese sites. There certainly is a strong argument for the benefits of Unicode on multilingual sites.
To be on the safe side I would recommend that you use the Shift_JIS charset. That is probably the most prevalent page encoding method you'll see for Japanese sites. I know that I have never heard of any troubles with a Japanese SE on a Shift_JIS encoded page.
I agree with Bill in that Shift_JIS is definitely a safe encoding to go with for a Japanese website.
I have been using UTF8 on a few of our data driven websites with no problems other than that if you forget to include <html lang=ja> then some browsers that are not set to automatically detect encoding may show a blank white page.
As far as the SE's go, its important to include the meta tag defining your encoding set in addition to the lang=ja, as well as a few japanese words if you want to be certain your page is dislpayed in the SERP's when a user selects to see SERP's containing only Japanese pages.
Thanks
On-page optimization can really only go so far. You use the same general principles you would use on an English page, but really what matters is the site's popularity. If you can generate compelling content that will attract return visitors you'll find that your link popularity will naturally grow...but that's another topic altogether ;)
