Motoko’s weblog

The use of XML sitemap seems to come up at the search conferences all the time, and SES London was not an exception. During the “Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps” session, one of the panelists advised not to use XML file to get pages indexed. He said that it wouldn’t get them indexed any quicker, and a link from big, popular and authoritative site would work much better. I completely agree with him in the way that XML site map won’t help getting page indexed quicker, or ranking page higher in the search results.

The best way to let the engines crawl your site/pages is to; 1) get good links from other websites, and 2) have good linking structure within your site. The link is the way to tell engines that there are pages on the other side of the links.
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I had a short interview yesterday, and the question was “What do you want Google to bring for Christmas?” My answer was “easier algorithms”. OK, maybe “easy” wasn’t the right word, I should’ve said something like “standardized” or even “fare” and this is my thought behind this answer.

We have a pretty good understandings of the algorithm. We know about the keyword, the links, the TLD’s, the hosting, etc., but we also know that even though you are dealing with the same Google, what seems to be the good practice isn’t always so in other market. For example, the link strategies that works in US market may not be the best approach in other markets even though Google tells you it works the same.

No matter how easy or complex the algorithm is, as long as many sites compete to be on the 1st page where only 10 links are available, SEO will play an important part of your search strategy. Social media is great, but what we found from the surveys is that people don’t always click a link in Continue Reading »

Back in May, Google launched “Rich Snippets” in Google.com search results. This review and price range information appear in the search results. It requires you to add the markup formats to your website.

Rich Snippets was just rolled-out in Japan, which is the second market to use this feature. August and December are 2 of the biggest gift giving months in Japan, and this new feature came out just in time to help those holiday shoppers.

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I’ve been providing Japanese Search Marketing services to US and European companies since 1998. Because Japan has been one of the most advanced market online where people actually drop money (Japan is the second largest e-commerce market in the world) since the early years of Internet, regardless of the size of the business, Japan has been one of the attractive online market for foreign businesses. What’s interesting and troubling at the same time is that the type of inquiries I receive haven’t changed much for the past 10 years. There are 4 groups of inquiries:

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.  Continue Reading »