Hi,

I'm going to try to market my web design and SEO skills to the Japanese market within New Zealand.

Has anyone had any experience with SEO for Japanese search engines?
Or do they normally follow the usual rules/tactics.

Cheers,
Bob.

Yahoo has been the biggest search engine in Japan - the 2 bit characters are a bitch - love pastel colors - right to left needs special program to do.... but is educational

Thanks for that. Looks like I have an 'interesting' journey ahead of me! ;-)

yes other languages are always fun

right to left needs special program to do....
I've never had to use RTL on any of my Japanese sites, have you? Standard Japanese sites are LTR, just like Western sites. Japanese only reads right to left when it is written vertically.

Yahoo Japan is indeed the #1 engine in Japan, but soon they will be using a variant of Google in their SERPs, so that will simplify SEO to a degree.

With Yahoo Japan it was always possible to buy links and get ranking. That's what most Japanese SEOs do (That's all a lot of them do). That will change in a Yahoo Japan powered by Google.

I've never had to use RTL on any of my Japanese sites, have you? Standard Japanese sites are LTR, just like Western sites. Japanese only reads right to left when it is written vertically.

Yahoo Japan is indeed the #1 engine in Japan, but soon they will be using a variant of Google in their SERPs, so that will simplify SEO to a degree.

With Yahoo Japan it was always possible to buy links and get ranking. That's what most Japanese SEOs do (That's all a lot of them do). That will change in a Yahoo Japan powered by Google.

Hey Bill,
Thanks for that info, hopefully I might have something over these other SEO guys in Japan who only buy links.
By the way, Osaka was one of my favorite places when I visited. Very friendly people and the Okonomiyaki was great :)