Overview Yahoo! Japan

Yahoo! Japan has been founded Janyary 21 in 1996. With over 3,500 employees, its’ head office is located in Roppongi, Minato, Tokyo. The largest stockholder is Softbank, one of the biggest Japanese telecommunications and media corporation.

Status of Yahoo! Japan

Among Japanese search engines, Yahoo has the biggest share. Yahoo! sites attracts more than half of all searches in Japan. Yahoo! sites captured 51% of all search quaries, while Google sites captured 38%. Rakutan Inc. follow them only with 2%.(the data abstracted from comscore.com)

But importance of Yahoo! Japan is not just measured by its search engine volume alone– Google Japan also takes significant share of search volume with fast growth, so you can never ignore Google Japan. What’s more important is to know the reason why Japaneses web users are so close to Yahoo.

Change for Better Search.

Japanese used to be unfamiliar with using search keyword box. So former Yahoo’s main page looked pretty different from theseday’s. Search volume was low, categories tab named ‘Yahoo! service’ which contains shopping travel, news, sports, financial, maps, cook, real estate, blog and much more showed up-front in the main page. Japanese loved it. It enforced Yahoo! Japan’s influence in Japanese search engine market. But as time goes by Japanese have known search engine’s quality and quantity result and get used to keyword search. Google Japan has made contribution to Japanese SEO. As Google had become bigger in Japan, the trend kept growing. Finally in 2008, Yahoo! Japan decided to change its main page noticeably. Now Yahoo!Japan more focuses on providing better search engine result service. It means there is a lot more chance to meet Japanese customer by Japanese SEO campaign.

               <Yahoo! Japan main page>

However, still Japanese web users are well experieced in various verticals. You must check out your website’s rank and accessability in those verticals with organic search result’s.

Successful Japanese SEO depends on making full use of them.

Japan is one of the biggiest search engine markets in the world. Its internet population is over 60 million (It has no.3 internet population in the world.).

If you are thinkin g about starting SEO campaign in Japan, you should consider two things.

Japanese SEO 1. Keep your eye on Yahoo! Japan to understand Japanese web users’ web surfing pattern. Unlike worldwide web users– I mean in general… you know Korean also prefer Naver & Daum as a favorite search engines, Chinese love Baidu –, Japanese prefer Yahoo!. Yahoo! sites attracts more than half of all searches in Japan. Yahoo! sites captured 51% of all search quaries, while Google sites captured 38%. Rakutan Inc. follow them only with 2%.(the data abstracted from comscore.com)

But when I said ‘focusing on yahoo!’, it means not just the search engine volume alone – Google Japan also takes significant share of search volume with fast growth, so you can never ignore Google Japan - , but kowning the reason why Japanses web users so close to Yahoo! That is the key to success Japanese SEO. If you know your enemy and yourself, you can win every battle!

(For Japanese SEO, Find out more about Yahoo! Japan.)

Japanese SEO 2. Don’t forget mobile users! According to Japanese General Services Administration’s recent research of ‘trend of communication use in 2009’, more than 82.5 million visitors – among 15.7 million surveyed web users - have connected internet by mobile, representing nearly 40% percent of the Japanese online connection. Raging from Social networking, to surfing blogs, to finding info in search engines, the various applications are drawing new users into the mobile web.

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Japanese Search Engine – Yahoo! Japan