Motoko’s weblog

Can a small site with a small budget be successful going against big sites in search? - This is one of the popular questions that I’m asked frequently. It is possible for a small business with a small website to successfully run a business online even in the overseas markets. In fact, there are quite a few of them out there doing really well. Here are my advices and tips to small business owners, who are considering reaching foreign markets through search.

Use your limited budget wisely.

It’s best to localize the site for the target market. It’s not just for SEO purpose, but also for the better customer experiences on your website. Now that the engines are pushing websites with the right signals (local language, local ccTLD, hosted in local market, CONTINUE READING »

One of the biggest search industry conferences, Search Engine Strategies New York will be held next week (March 23-25), and this year, I will be speaking at 2 sessions:
- Managing a Global SEO Campaign on March 23 from 12:45pm
- Crossing Boarders: Global Site Clinic on March 25 from 4pm

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!

Starting March 18, I will be serving as a member of SEMPO board of directors along with 12 other members. I am very excited to have the opportunity to serve the organization, which has more than 800 organizations, companies and individual members from around the world, educating the industry and people about the search and digital marketing.

Since the day I joined SEMPO, I’ve believed in the cause and the role it has in the industry. I was a founding member of SEMPO Japan, which is the first regional group within SEMPO. After I helped establishing SEMPO India and SEMPO Singapore, I was appointed as a chairman of SEMPO Asia in 2007. In 2009, after establishing SEMPO Greater China, we grew to SEMPO APAC, and our activities now reach to Australia and New Zealand.
CONTINUE READING »

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.
CONTINUE READING »