Forum Moderators: open
Can anyone give me a few top tips to help me regain some initiative in Japan?
Good Question. Are you translating into Japanese or simply optimising English pages for the Japanese Market? That may have a breaing.
For more detailed information one for our resident Japanese experts who know far more about this than any of us should be along soon.
Onya
Woz
We have submitted to Yahoo Japan which gets us a few referrals and set up a local domain on a completely different IP address (Japanese server as opposed to US server for main site).
We get good referrals from: Google; Yahoo Google-search JP; Yahoo; MSN JP...
Plus some form Nifty; Biglobe; Excite JP; Lycos JP; Infoseek JP...
...all in approximate decreasing order. Am I missing out on any big players?
I'll leave it up to others for more specific ideas though.
Onya
Woz
I no expert in the Japanese language, but I have many number one and two rankings for keywords related to my business and nearly 50% of my referrals are from Japanese Search engines.
I am competing successfully with major Japanese players that are well known. Very few Japanese have heard of my company, yet I have lots of traffic that generates a large number of bookings. All my pages have industry specific keywords in the title, each word separated by a space.
The first thing I would consider is removing your business name from the title and replace it with two or three industry specific keywords that appear on relevant pages. By doing this you should have a lot more prominent keywords.
IMHO, very few people are going to type a company name for keywords. They are more likely to type industry specific keywords.
You appear to have most of the search engines covered except for Goo.
Nifty and Biglobe use Google.
Bill and Keikei, I am interested in your experiences in relation to how important the title is.
red lorry, yellow car, blue bus
red lorry yellow car blue bus
redlorryyellowcarbluebus
You can guess that I don't speak Japanese (just use a translator) but even I can see that Japanese sentences don't contain spaces. What is the convention for separating phrases? (commas, dashes...?)
Like Gorufu said, you're missing Goo, which is still a relatively big player. Since you have already paid for Yahoo! Japan I'd suggest you also drop a little money on LookSmart as well. They claim to reach 70% of the Japanese Internet population...whatever that means ;) If LookSmart goes PPC in Japan they will be the first PPC engine in this market. It might be good to be in on the ground floor if they take off like Overture did in the US/Europe market...and Overture Japan is rumored to be looking to start up soon as well.
We had a good thread about this topic the other week here [webmasterworld.com]
As far as spaces in titles go I've had luck both with and without them. When Japanese search for separate keywords they generally enter a space, so this can be a good way to get inadvertent exact matches. However, natural Japanese language, as you have noticed, has no spaces, but the engines have been able to parse out keywords so far...I haven't really run a direct comparison of space vs. no space keyword titles, maybe keikei has. My impression is that having the industry keywords in the title is important, but I'm not sure what the effect of the space would be. I get the impression that a Japanese engine can dig that info out without the space.
Also, it looks like you've got the exact same Japanese content under a subdirectory of your .com site as well as on the .jp site...might some of these engines be thinking you have duplicate content up? Mirrored content could hurt your ranking in some cases if you're not careful.
I know that mirrored sites has been well documented, but I just wanted to run my situation by you...
The mirrored .jp site contains about a quarter of the pages of the main .com/jp/ site, with dirrerent page names and titles, plus a few other small differences to help differentiate the sites, which are hosted in Japan and the US respectively. Have I taken enough precautions, or is mirroring just a big no-no?
Do a site search at the top of the page and you'll find a lot of educated arguments both for and against mirroring your content. I'm not a big fan of mirroring and have seen a number of site rankings sink because of it.
My question to you would be, why not just put all of the Japanese content on the Japanese site? Why bother risking the slightly altered, yet similar content on the .com domain?
Finally, up until now I had used our company name for the first two words of most pages, mainly to maintain a corporate identity, but also because many people search for our company name. In Japan, this is less the case, but I carried on with the same theme... however, written in Japanese, our company name is quite long. With western languages using spaces between words, you can see what weighting a particular word has in a sentence (ie how prominent it is), so with Japanese text not having any spaces, surely the 'weighting' is based on the number of characters in use?... which would mean that the prominence of words following our company name will be less that I would like? Can anyone enlighten me?
Take Gorufu's advice with the company name...you could be wasting some valuable space in the titles. When you translate words that don't have a Japanese equivalent you use katakana, which is a phonetic script, and thus as you have noticed you end up with extremely long words (compared to the native Japanese terminology). One compromise might be to add the company name to the end of the title where you can. Then, depending on the SE, the company name may or may not show up in the SERPS. Another possibility would be to put the company name in English, again at the end of the title.
Keep us posted. I'd be interested to hear how your pages fare.
Thats great information, thanks very much.
BTW, Welcome to Webmasterworld.
Onya
Woz
[spelling]
(edited by: Woz at 2:18 am (utc) on April 12, 2002)
InfoSeek Japan submissions, like negubon said, are pretty unique. They do a lot of pre-qualification of your page even before you can submit. This ensures that they have a lower level of spam noise in their results. For several years now InfoSeek Japan has had this system in place, and I believe it was instituted initially to make sure that only Japanese sites were listed. They also filter out a lot of the meta-tag spam.
Like negubon said, they ask that you e-mail submissions for .com, .net & .org domains (multiple URLs accepted). For other URLs (.jp variants) you can have InfoSeek check your page to see whether it passes their criteria for submission. They send a robot out that instantly checks the page in question and your robots.txt file.
Here is a list of pages InfoSeek won't list:
I think your industry is so targeted to achive good leads from search engines. Might consider to submit email ads to industry-specific newsletters or portal sites.
In terms of SEO I'd recommend you to focus on the word "microscope" that I assume the most searched keyword in your market. At least some company seems to be buying a keyword ad for this term :)
Do you have any advice in terms <title> length, [or any other page characteristic] keyword positioning and prominence?
I don't think there is much difference in terms of how to apply those SEO forumulas to Japanese keywords, except when you target phrases. As you mentioned, there is no "space" between keywords and sometimes this complicates the issue.
As for your site I'd suggest you to put the "microscope" (in Japanese) 1st in the title tag (and meta tags too). Furthere I'd recommend you to spread more "microscope" on your pages... definitely more in body text and even inside ALT tag.
And spend some time (ask your translator) to find related Japanese sites and link to yours. This is the best bet to target Google and I think you can achive the top 10 position with relative efforts.
