How to optimize for Japanese market

keyword domains and file names

[globay]

I'll probably be doing a site for the Japanese market, but unfortunately I don't know much about Japanese search engine optimization. Though I got some answers using the site search, I still have some questions:

- Is it possible to put keywords in the domain names? Domain names and folder names are quite important for Google(.com) to determine the ranking of a page. How does it work in Japan?

- Are there any other big differences in the search algorithms of Google.com and Google.jp?

Thanks for your help,

--
globay

[takagi]

Domain names and folder names
It is possible to get a domain name with kanji (Chinese characters) or other non-ASCII characters. This will cause a lot of trouble because your visitors need to download a plug-in from Verisign. Almost nobody has it installed, so that is not really an option. For more info see the thread: זרו domains - When will it be safe to start using non-english characters? [webmasterworld.com]

In the rest of the URL (folder names, file names) you can put some keywords in kanji/hiragana/katakana, but that will help you only a little bit for Google. See the thread: Naming files in Asian languages ... - Does it help with SEO? [webmasterworld.com] It will also depend on your server/ftp-program if this can be done in your case or not.

Big differences in the search algorithms
No big differences. It will be harder to get a decent PageRank, but that is also true for the competition so that won't hurt your site. Just like the American Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) Yahoo! Japan (www.yahoo.co.jp) uses data from Google, but for how long...? Please do realize Yahoo! Japan is important for the Japanese market (Google Adwords and Yahoo Japan - Most of the click throughs coming from Yahoo [webmasterworld.com]). Try also to get Japanese content, not just translated pages.