Since Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced its plan for search service tie-up (both organic search and PPC services) in July, the search business partnership has been getting much of the attention and some criticisms. Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), who initially gave a statement that they didn’t think it would violate the Antitrust (or Competition) Law, is now investigating the potential problems in response to Rakuten’s reqeust submitted last month, by interviewing organizations and businesses including Microsoft.

Also, several members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party have formed “The Internet Search Issues Investigation Group” to create a bill to assure fair search and online advertising services by picking up issues that may not be regulated by the Antitrust Law.

The partnership has a major impact in business’s search engine marketing strategies in Japan, and everyone is paying a close attention to both engines’ move. Despite the criticisms, Yahoo seems to move forward with the switch, at least for now.

Yahoo results in FireFox

Yahoo results in Chrome

Google Results in FireFox

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.

However, I do recommend using XML site map, too. Of course, not to have the pages indexed “quicker” or to rank higher, but it does help engines to crawl those pages that are not indexed, yet.

I agree that the number of pages indexed isn’t much of a big deal, especially when we have other ways such as social media to make those important pages be seen by the audiences. But it is still important for the pages to be indexed (assuming that you want those pages to be indexed). For example, even if you created a good linking structures within your site, if some pages are not indexed, the links pointing to other pages from those pages won’t count, and your work won’t have a full effect.

Anyway, if some pages are not indexed naturally, there’s a problem. Use XML site map and tell engines to crawl. If there’s a problem, it will come up in the tools such as Google Webmaster Tool, and give you an idea of how to correct it.

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 blog or tweets or on facebook posting right there. They remember what they saw, and later when the need for such brands, services or products arise, they search for it to find out more about them. Social media triggers people to search more. And, when people search and come to the site, things like the content on the website/pages and the usability of the website makes the difference in converting the visitors to the users and ultimately to new customers. My concern is that due to more complex algorithm, the website owners are so focused on the optimization, and forget why you have the website in the first place. It’s for people, not for the search engines.

I see that Google trying to bring more localized (location centric) search results lately. This is great if you are looking for the information provided locally, but sucks when you want to find the information available on web in general. If you are in US, it is almost impossible to find websites in Australia, even through the sites in Australia are in English. Google almost limits what you should find in the search results. I appreciate their thought on this, but really not helping the search users in my opinion.

It also have a huge impact on website owners, especially to the small and medium size business owners who has been doing well on Internet using one English website to target multiple English speaking markets. I guess Google wants you to spend money on AdWords to target those non-local markets. But that’s not helping the site owners and the search users.

I guess my answers to the question is, “I want Google to realize that the people are not always looking for the information available locally, and give an option to search locally or globally.”

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.

Numbers of the market surveys show that Japanese usually go to the search engines to obtain the information of the products or the services prior to purchase. The surveys also show that Japanese trust peer reviews more than the information provided on company’s website. This is why websites such as Yahoo Answers and Kakaku.com (product review and rating site) are very popular in Japan.

If you are selling products or services on website targeting Japanese market, waste no time to implement the Rich Snippets on your site. See here for the instruction. But first, you need to fill out the form “Interested in Rich Snippets?” here.

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.

The search box has been used in ads for a while in Japan, but was really taking off when I was in Japan back in July. I saw it on TV ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads, ads on train/subways, etc. etc. It was every where. I was curious, and tried several search phrases in different ads to see if they were ranking or not. I thought that their page should come up high in the search results along with the paid ad, if the search phrase was their company name, brand name, or product name, but some (like DoCoMo’s “Ano bucho” seemed to be too generic.) What I found was that in most cases, they rank high only for the paid ads in the search result page, and were no where to be found in the organic search results.

When you run a campaign like this, it’s like announcing the world, “If you search for this word, you will find us on the results page right away!”, and you should make sure to be on the 1st page of the search results 24-7. I was surprised and disappointed by the fact that many businesses chose not to optimize the landing page for the phrase. When the campaign money runs out, or the daily budget runs out, if you don’t rank well organically, someone else (maybe your competitors) would benefit from it.