SEO strategies for China/Japan/Korea

[Simondev]

Hi, I'm interested in expanding our SEO efforts to include japan, china and korea. Could someone please recommend me

1) The best areas for submissions
2) Specific guidelines/pitfalls that I should look at? (i.e. meta tags, directories, etc).
3) Top search engines to aim for besides yahoo, google.
4) Any type of articles or research I could take a look at.

Thanks!
Simon

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Simondev.

This forum is probably the best source of information (in English) about these markets. However, your questions are pretty broad and cover the entire scope of this forum. I think you'll find some valuable information by reading through the old threads here. We've covered most of these topics several times, many of them recently. I think you'll have better luck asking market specific questions after you've done a bit of reading here as China, Japan and Korea are all very different markets.

[kevinpate]

Unless you just happen to be marketing a manual entitled Asian IP's & the Attempted Exploitation of Formmail, the traffic I see from the far east would be of little interest to you. If per chance you do have that product, give it up,cause they're already at least three editions ahead of ya.

Sorry to be so cynical, but it's not totally void of reason.

[Simondev]

Ok, more specifically I am looking for the names of the top search engines that users of Japan, China and Korea are using. From old posts

Japan:
google 69%
yahoo 68%
goo 33%
infoseek 23%
msn 13
excite 12%

China Baidu, sina, sohu, yahoo, google (when it's not banned).

Korea?

This is old information I found on previous posts, so I re-posting in hopes of finding new information from anyone who is familiar with this region.

I am going to be helping a company who already has sites in japanese, chinese and korean as well as english and want to help them optimize their sites for each specific country. (Sorry kevinpate, no content on entitled Asian IP's & the Attempted Exploitation of Formmail)

In terms of paid inclusion submissions I understand that I can still use inktomi, fast, and jeeves. Is there any others that you would recommend?

Thanks!

[bill]

Good PPC info in this thread:
What's the best solution for PPC Korea/China/Japan [webmasterworld.com]

[GrendelKhan TSU]

Korea Search Engine rankings?

well...here's what a couple local metrix sites say:

Based on Unique Visitors:
(in thousands)
1 daum.net 17,128
2 kr.yahoo.com 12,560
3 naver.com 12,457
4 nate.com 6,996
5 dreamwiz.com 6,648
6 hanafos.com 6,301
7 bugsmusic.co.kr 5,710 (NOT a search engine)
8 empas.com 5,307
9 netian.com 5,059
10 netmarble.net 5,036 (NOT a search engine)

Now from a different source....

Here's today's numbers:
Top 5 Ranking Sites (based on category)
==> note: a web site cannot appear in two categories...which is why for example, Daum is not listed in the general search engines though it has significant search volume.)

==============

Category: General search engines
(Columns are:
rank for category/search engine/overall rank/market share/UV per day---I think for search function specifically)

1 Naver - 2 - 49.40% 6,678,897
2 Yahoo Korea - 3 - 25.79% 4,257,293
3 Empas - 5 - 13.24% 2,333,171
4 Hanmir - 25 - 3.20% 886,874
5 Google Korea - 36 - 1.99% 428,628

=================================
Category: Community Portals
**Columns are:
rank for category/search engine/overall rank/market share/UV per day

1 Daum - 1 - 51.43% 8,019,550
2 Sayclub - 6 - 8.00% 1,602,722
3 Dreamwiz - 8 - 6.79% 1,614,182
4 Cyworld* - 12 - 4.47% 930,308
5 MSN korea - 13 - 4.29% 1,201,932

*cyworld is a Nate.com subsidiary (Nate formerly Lycos Korea) Nate itself ranks top for mobile search. :)

==================

NOTE: Korea Wisenut and a few other SE solution companies provide search results for many top Korean sites and portal search engines. Like Softwise provides search for Yahoo Korea and K.Wisenut provides backfill search for Zingu.com (among others). So optimizing for those engines will give you ranking in many smaller Korean search engines. ;)

Also, its notable that Goog Korea is NO WHERE near the big dog in Korea (as of yet). For search....its Naver all the way. However, there entire first page is paid-for results only. Yahoo SEO is still quite useful, but I would recommend going through a local SEO company in Korea. Like, internetbrother said...Do a search. ;)

Hope that helps. :)