Published by Motoko on 08 Dec 2009
I just posted my presentation about the Search in Japan from International Search Summit in London last month.
As you can see, my presentation shows bunch of numbers, which don’t mean much to you unless you were in the audience. Here’s what I talked about.
Market:
94 million Internet users
75.3% Penetration rate
4% access Internet from TV and gaming devices
73.4% on Broad Band
90% of Continue Reading »
Published by Motoko on 07 Dec 2009
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 »
Published by Motoko on 05 Dec 2009
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.
Published by Motoko on 05 Mar 2009
About 3 weeks ago, the news of Google Japan using paid bloggers to promote their new “hot new keywords” function on the top page took over the search industry around the world. (You can read my initial thought on the topic here.) What’s very interesting to me is that everyone has been spinning it as a “link-spam scheme”, and as a result, Google “punished” Google Japan by down grading the page rank from 9 to 5. (Yeah, that should really hurt Google Japan. lol)
Paid or not, the “word of mouth” campaign using blog has been quite effective in Japan. Many people are aware that some of the bloggers may be paid to write the review, and still welcome the information especially since being compensated doesn’t mean that they’d write something that are not true. Several surveys done in Japan show that people trust and value what they read on blog posts, and often time what they read has an impact on their purchasing decision or action. I assume that Continue Reading »
