Global SEO Management and Global Site Clinic

Date: March 17, 2010 Author: Motoko Hunt

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!

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Excited to be a member of the SEMPO Board of Directors

Date: March 15, 2010 Author: Motoko Hunt

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.

XML Site Map – Good or Bad?

Date: February 26, 2010 Author: Motoko Hunt

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.

Website Localization for Japan – Search Ranking

Date: January 24, 2010 Author: Motoko Hunt

The time is tough, and the budget is shrinking… I understand. But localizing the website into local language is the first step in targeting the foreign countries, especially Japan. It is not just because the average Japanese don’t read/write in English well enough to understand the English content. If your website is not in Japanese, it would have little to no chances of being found in the search results in Japan. It’s that simple.

1. Japanese is the national language in Japan

When Japanese use search engines, it is highly likely that they enter Japanese keywords and phrases written in Japanese characters. If your website doesn’t have the keywords and phrases in Japanese as the searcher entered, your site won’t show up in the search results.

Yahoo Japan Latest Algorithm Update

Date: January 7, 2010 Author: Motoko Hunt

In addition to the regular Yahoo algorithm updates, time to time, Yahoo Japan has its own algorithm changes, which are unique to Japanese market. In December 2009, they had another major updates, and many experienced the changes in ranking. Here is a list of some of the changes I’ve seen in the past month.

The authority pages are valued more
The hub pages are valued more
The accessibility and the file size are valued more

Of course, the competition level is different depending on the keyword, and that also determines how much of the changes you saw since the last update.

Now, in order to benefit from this update, I recommend following optimization work: