Mokoto Hunt presenting Search in Japan at the ISS London 2009 According to Makoto

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E-commerce is huge in Japan, as well as high speed internet penetration, mobile internet and mobile usage. Some useful figures: E-commerce generates $35.85 billion Japanese character-based domain names will be out soon. 9 out of 10 japanese use the mobile web More than a third are on a flat-rate ‘all you can eat’ plan 80% of them are on 3G Japanese mobile phone users use their mobile phones for plenty of things: watching TV, paying for tickets, drinks and food, scanning codebars to avoid having to enter urls, apart from making make phone calls SEO is a growing SEM technique, and so is SMO (social media optimisation) Yahoo has the lion's share of the search engine market with a 53% market share.


Google takes up the remainder 47%, which in my vi uk email address list ew, is not too bad considering Yahoo's dominance. Having been to Japan on a pleasure trip at the beginning of November, I had the chance to personally get impressions/opinions from some Japanese friends about the internet and search engines. Their general impression was that Google had no chance in Japan as Yahoo was giving the Japanese the right products at the right time. They all spoke very keenly about Yahoo! and not so much about Google Some challenges about doing SEO in Japan are: Japanese alphabet doesn’t require having spaces to separate words, it makes it more difficult for search engines to be able to understand keywords.





Japanese alphabet is made of four different alphabets, so this adds to a linguistic complexity that search engines need to overcome in order to be able to return quality results. Koichiro Fukasawa from Wasabi Communications took over from Mahoto Hunt and he began the presentation explaining that as the market geared towards an increased use of the internet on their mobile phones, it would not be a bad idea to focus on Yahoo! Mobile or Google mobile! instead of putting all resources on the more mainstream search engines.