Here’s the session description:

As the world becomes smaller and search marketing becomes more complex, the era of “ranking well in Google” is over. This is especially true for companies who are targeting multiple markets or countries. This new opportunity also brings many new complexities to be considered other than standard SEO. This session tackles these key issues critical to successfully developing, optimizing, and launching the Global Websites that would meet those next generation marketing goals, without losing control or your mind.

The session will cover the following topics and will include some case studies:

Keyword research
Language & cultural issues
Geographical issues
Issues involving different engines and platforms
Leveraging standardized templates to develop global websites
Cross-border management issues
Copy writing for multiple audiences
Adapting unique market trends and techniques

Hope to see a room full of people there.

If you haven’t purchased the conference pass, yet, you can register here.

Me and 4 other Global SEO experts will share the knowledge, experiences and case studies at the Global SEO session. Don’t worry, 5 of us have coordinated the content of our presentations so that you won’t hear the same thing from each of us. Instead, you’ll learn different topic from different angles from both agency and in-house operation.

I’m also looking forward to the Global Site Clinic session, which I will be on a panel with (who else?) Bill Hunt. I did this session in London last month, which turned out to be a very interesting session for everyone from already have global sites with some concerns to the business owners who are considering of using website to reach overseas markets.

See you in New York!

Me and 3 other speakers will talk about:

The global markets offer rich pickings for many US firms who haven’t yet dipped a toe in the water! This panel will explain how to identify export opportunities using keyword research and how to exploit them using either search engine optimization or pay per click. It will answer questions such as:

• How to decide where to target
• Using testing to minimize roll-out risks
• How much do you need to do to be effective?
• Which languages? Can you use English?
• Getting paid

We will focus on “how-to” discussions rather than to describe the status of Global search market. As more and more businesses are going Global, this session would be very informative and educational to many business owners and agencies. The content would be applicable to the businesses in all sizes.

Hope to see you there!

November 19th: International Search Summit in London, England – Search in Japan

November 24th: Search Engine Strategies Berlin, Germany – Search Around the World

Hope to see you there.

One of the biggest differences between the ad:tech conferences in Tokyo and other locations was that this one was more focused on the advertising with heavy mass media messaging rather than the digital marketing and the search marketing. You could see strong Dentsu influences to many sessions, which probably shows the current advertising market in Japan.

ad:tech Tokyo was provided in bilingual, English and Japanese, speakers and delegates from Japan, China, Singapore, Australia, UK, US, etc. Many delegates seemed to welcome foreign speakers, which give them a rare opportunity to hear the stories about the overseas market live. All 4 keynote speakers were foreigners, and the room was completely packed with people trying not to miss any words and taking notes.

Contrary to the session program, the exhibit hall was screaming how the search marketing industry was thriving in Japan with many search vendors. Agencies, tool and software companies, etc., they were all busily engaging with delegates.

Google University, Microsoft Advertising and Dentsu each had a separate room where people could learn about their services in detail.

One of the messages I heard through out the conference was “Branding is important”. Some even said, “Don’t worry about the numbers. Go big with branding. Creating the right “image” attached to your brand and products is most important.” This is something you don’t hear at the digital marketing conferences in US.

Not many sessions had concrete numbers, case studies, etc., especially the cost and pricing data. Not much of “how-to” information mentioned by speakers. I was looking forward to hear some of the data especially from mobile sessions as Japan is the leading market in mobile, but the presentations were more focused on the concept of advertising and marketing.

I spoke at two sessions at ad:tech Tokyo. One was the “Latest Trend and Future of SEM” at SEMPO’s sponsored session, and the other was the only “Search Marketing” session at the conference with representatives from Yahoo and Google. The Search Marketing session was a panel discussion form, but we used several slides to give a visual information to supplement the discussion. Yahoo and Google gave the tool and service information, how brands could benefit from the search marketing. I talked about the search marketing trends in US and how the large size corporations were adopting the search marketing into their operation. – I really wish we had more time to talk… hoping that there will be more search related sessions next year!

This was the first conference in Japan that I saw people were on Twitter. The difference was that people tweeted about their comments about the sessions rather than to report what was said. Many people use Twitter as micro-blogging tool at the conferences in US and Europe, but here, it was used to express their feelings and opinions.

Overall, it was a great conferences, and I’d love to see more of these great events in Japan. It is definitely needed to close the gap between the service providers and client’s in their view and knowledge level of search and advertising.

Currently, Asia has more than 40% of Internet users in the world. 3 of the top 5 countries on Internet are in Asia (China, Japan and India). SEMPO definitely recognizes that Asia is a very important market, and in order to learn more about the market, the board members are touring Asia to meet local members and industry leaders in June. As a chair of SEMPO Asia, I’m visiting Singapore, Beijing and Mumbai with the board members, and am very looking forward to the trip.

I’d like to thank SEMPO Asia Committee members who helped us so much to make the tour possible.  All of the committee members have their own job (many of them are CEO and President), and donated the time and resources to help us.

Press release: SEMPO Asia Tour

1. We have a website in English (or one of the European languages), and want Japanese website created and optimized. Don’t know much about how to go about it, and open to suggestions. Oh, and interested in doing PPC campaign, too.
2. We just create a Japanese website, and need someone to optimize it. Will send you the English keyword list for SEO and PPC campaign.
3. We have a Japanese website and our in-house team is managing it. Experiencing some problems and can really use outside help to guide them to the next level.
4. We want to target Japanese market, but our English site should do just fine. 

Regardless of the development stage or the understanding of doing business with oversea markets online, they all face the issues in developing a website and the ad campaigns that would be well accepted in foreign market. When I respond to them with some points to consider, just to make sure that they are ready for the project, often times they are surprised by it.

When creating a website for different markets, you can expect many benefits from centralizing the work. For example, if all websites use the same template, you’d need to optimize one set of template, and all websites will be benefited from the changes. Of course, you need to optimize the content separately. At the same time, centralized efforts could create new issues such as geo recognition by the engines. Sure, we can now use the geo-setting to tell Google which market the website is for, but engines such as Yahoo don’t provide the solution, yet. It is easy to say that you just need to get the local domain, but in order to obtain the local domain, you need to have the registered office and business in that country in many cases.

Global websites are not “copies” of your home website

The language is most definitely the major player in developing global website. Translating the site into different languages only puts you to the starting point, and you are far from ready to enter the market. You need to research keywords in each market separately. Not by the language, but by the market. The keyword research tells you some unique differences in search words trend even among English speaking countries. I’m not just talking about the spelling. The culture and what’s “in” in that market has huge impact on the searched phrases. Also, correct translation doesn’t meant that your pages contain the most searched phrases. For example, a simple word like “picture” can be translated in several different words in Japanese. Depending on which word your translator chooses to use, it may limit your potential exposure in Japanese market, and the campaign may fail.

Large sized corporation may face bigger challenges

Bigger does not always mean better, and the same can be said about managing the global website. The communication break down, loosing control over the teams in different market and frustration with limited room to adopt local market trend and needs, etc. many companies who own global website deal with new challenges, which are not the issues when you operating a website just targeting one market.

It is said that more companies will develop global website in 2009 especially targeting Asian market. I am looking forward to doing the session “Key points in launching a global website” on March 24 at Search Engine Strategies New York. There are 3 in-house experts on that panel with me. I’m very happy that they agreed to share their experiences in developing and managing global website. In relation to the SES NY session, I had a pleasure of being interviewed by Glenn Gabe of G-squared Interactive. As you can read on his blog, he has experiences in working with global websites and understands the challenges, which made the interview fun and interesting. It seems that more companies are at the stage to tackle the issues now. I hope the session will provide information and ideas to make them prepared better in launching a global website.

While “Mobile Search” hasn’t happened in US, UK and in Europe, it has been happening… in fact it’s huge in Asia especially in Japan. I hope to introduce some ideas of how to integrate mobile into the marketing mix.

The session is moderated by David Radicke of  Radicke eCommerce and presented by Cindy Krum of Rank-Mobile, Michael Boland of The Kelsey Group and me.

Since “Keyword and Content” session is targetted SEM beginners, I’m creating a presentation with basic, yet important information. But there are so many things to cover, I’m having a hard time making it to fit in 12min time.

The session is moderated by Mel Cason of Microsoft adCenter, and presented by Maxime Gradchamp of Trellian Europe, Tor Crockatt of Microsoft, Aisling Blake of Interactive Return and me.

Events such as Search Engine Strategies are not only a great places to learn, but also a great places to meet industry professionals from around the world. I hope to catch up with some familiar faces, and to meet some new.

Q1. Before we talk about SEO, can you tell me about your company, SEO Samba?

SEO Samba is the sole “organic search management platform.” We’ve coined the category name to distance ourselves from PPC management platforms that SEM specialists are already familiar with. SEO Samba’s focus is on maximizing web site performance with search engines and other “free-to-play” digital marketing channels such as blogs, news, video, social, and others. It enables SEM firms and SEO experts to manage an unlimited number of organic search clients, projects and web sites from a single interface—and change SEO best practices across them all with a single click. From a conceptual standpoint, we propose that web marketers and professionals deploy and enforce best practices from a single point rather than manually coding these evolving best practices into each of these sites while hoping that end-users will not gradually undo these practices.

SEO Samba also generates additional sales for our SEM firm partners by referring businesses who come directly to our web site. These businesses, mostly small and medium sized, are in need of extra services and want make the most out of the SEO Samba platform.

Q2. In United States and Western Europe, Google is pretty much the focus of SEO and SEM, but can others who wish to target other engines and other European languages benefit from the Organic Search Management Platform, too?

At the expert level, SEO Samba’s users have the flexibility to build SEO automation rules that best suit their market and any associated targeted search engines. As a result, any web marketer can benefit from using an organic search management platform.

SEO Samba’s rule engine is immediately portable to other languages and markets. However, some other important functionalities, as well as interfaces, need to be localized in order to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities. We will start actively recruiting SEM firm partners in European countries in the second quarter of the year.

Q3. SEO is no longer just about the web site. Blog, video sharing and so many social media applications are out there. I am sure that it is getting to be very challenging to all the site owners especially to small-medium businesses with limited budget and manpower. Any advice on where to start?

A number of applications (.http://www.twhirl.org/,  http://ping.fm, http://friendfeed.com/ ) have hit the marketplace recently that seek to aggregate social channels into a single broadcasting interface. While interesting and useful to their target users, most focus on building as large of a distribution network as possible for individual mass-market users.

We address this challenge differently with SEO Samba and focus on the needs of small and medium business web marketers and giving additional ammunition to our SEO firm partners. We see organic search as a field increasingly going beyond text results indeed. Social applications, news, blogs, video are all “free-to-play” marketing channels but are costly to research, select, manage and integrate with other marketing endeavors. And from a SERP standpoint, there is more to it. As Google puts it in their FAQ, “Social media is great! But there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.” At SEO Samba, we discriminate and prioritize channels to focus on the ones that have the potential to generate highest volume of direct traffic and business activity while improving your rankings in search engines.  In addition, we address the manpower challenge faced by SMB by providing a high level of integration and minimizing web marketers’ content creation efforts. For example, our first universal search module (provided free of charge) is a news module that provides a Google News-ready structure, news articles that are search optimized according to your chosen best practices, search friendly scrollers, automated RSS feeds creation, integrated with email newsletter platforms such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response etc. You can publish news across all your sites with a single click then aggregate news items across web sites to create unique newsletters and market to a cross segment of your email list, and, finally, save these newsletters with one click to any of your web sites. Each of our upcoming modules will provide the same level of details to ensure web site visibility, while expanding the least time possible from a user, content writer, marketer and SEO experts’ perspectives.

Q4. What do you think will happen or would you like to see in the search industry in 2009?

Search industry is not immune to the economic environment at large, even if it will hold up better than most. I think that most will revise growth plans according to the new deal. As a result, we will see some consolidation in the marketplace at the agency level. At the same time, some historical brick-and-mortar players who are still searching for their online model will be pressured to hunt for acquisitions and purchase platforms that can help them overcome their current digital strategy shortcomings. On the established search engine level, I would not be surprised if Microsoft finally cuts a deal with Yahoo for their search business and starts to aggressively circle Google by buying major players internationally in order to build a market share position they can hold on to. Meanwhile, Google will consolidate its online/offline ad products offering strategy and increasingly tweak its algorithm, weighing in more heavily on the social/buzz side of things, but in a very discriminating way. I expect to gradually see more variability in page results. However, this will not change fundamentally the playbook for good SEO work built around sound, engaging content and relentless optimization execution. Of course, we hope that web marketers will see SEO Samba as a good venue to help with this.

Q5. You moved from the RSS panel for scheduling conflict, what would have liked to tell the audience about RSS feeds?

As David Gilbraith put it, search engines answer three questions—How relevant? How fresh? How much? RSS answers the ‘how fresh’ question, and is therefore extremely valuable for SERPs. With improved standards for ping, RSS will become even more useful and could even replace crawling as a way for search engines to get results on pages. Some work needs to be done in terms of authentication and payload, but the general concept of delivering only fresh content/data at the time of publishing in place of have search engines crawling everything and looking for what’s new makes a lot of sense from a scalability stand point. So I believe SEO professionals should keep an eye on this.

From a corporate setting, RSS can have immediate and direct operational and marketing benefits on top of enhancing SERPs for web site owners. A good way to go about this is aggregating external RSS feeds and internal content through a publishing platform which will filter and repurpose content for distribution to a selected audience of employees, customers and partners. Here, the key is to harness the firing power of blogs,      aggregating and search optimizing the content and architecture (particular attention has to be paid to Google “juice” pass through when tracking subscriptions), and distribute automatically through specialized channels. This opens the door to creating new ad revenues as well. Some good platform resources for this include:

PressFeeds (news – standalone)
SEO Samba (web/news + Google news distribution)
Attensa (enterprise)
KnowNow (enterprise)
NewsGator (enterprise)

Thank you, Michal, for great insignt of the industry. I could sense your passion for the work you do, and I’m looking forward to meeting you in London!

Please visit the post “Interview with Motoko Hunt about Search Around the World & SES Chicago 2008“.

Yesterday, I did Bruce Clay’s SEM Synergy interview, and talked about Search Market in Japan. It will be broadcasted on Webmaster Radio on Wednesday, November 5 at 12:00pm. MP3 file can be downloaded after the show.

It is graet to see that more people are interested in Asian market now. Asia is already the largest market online, and at the same time, it is still growing at very quickly. I can see why US and European businesses are interested in the region especially China, India and Japan. The Asian culture seems to be so much different from Western cultures, perhaps it can be intimidating at the beginning. The good news is that you have an access to market specialists at events such as SES Chicago and on Internet (lots of blogs specialized in different markets). I hope to do my part in successfully bringing non-Asian businesses to Japan and other parts of Asia through search marketing.