Spiderman: the Web wizard of Japanese search engine optimization.WE don't normally focus on specific IT products, because, frankly, there's something "new" out every day. But occasionally a true breakthrough product comes along that we know our readers will want to use. ********** SOZON'S SEOSPY[TM] is just such a product, and we believe it will revolutionize rev·o·lu·tion·ize tr.v. rev·o·lu·tion·ized, rev·o·lu·tion·iz·ing, rev·o·lu·tion·iz·es 1. To bring about a radical change in: Television has revolutionized news coverage. 2. the way companies in Japan interact with indigenous Internet search engines. Surprisingly, the product was developed here in Japan by a foreign entrepreneur: the self-taught engineer and now managing director of his own venture, Amir Ayalon. The venture is called Sozon, an abbreviation abbreviation, in writing, arbitrary shortening of a word, usually by cutting off letters from the end, as in U.S. and Gen. (General). Contraction serves the same purpose but is understood strictly to be the shortening of a word by cutting out letters in the middle, of the term "Strategic Optimization Zone," and was started by Ayalon and his two partners, Yasushi Bamba and Takuo Yamanaka. Ayalon is playing a significant role in Japan's Search Engine Optimization Designing a Web site so that search engines easily find the pages and index them. The goal is to have your page be in the top 10 results of a search. Optimization includes the choice of words used in the text paragraphs and the placement of those words on the page, both visible and hidden (SEO (Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimizer) See search engine optimization. ) industry, and we asked him why he thinks Sozon has a strong chance of becoming a major player on the Japanese Internet scene. Why is a foreigner Foreigner All institutions and individuals living outside the United States, including US citizens living abroad, and branches, subsidiaries, and other affiliates abroad of US banks and business concerns; also central governments, central banks, and other official institutions of creating a Japanese product for Japanese users and Japanese search engines? Maybe it's comething to do with my background. I'm not really rooted in any particular place and am just as happy creating products here in Japan as I am anywhere else. I was born in Israel, but from the age of two moved to and grew up in Australia. I came to Japan in August 1994 to study Aikido aikido: see martial arts. aikido Japanese art of self-defense. It employs locks and holds and utilizes the principle of nonresistance to cause an opponent's own momentum to work against him or her. and have been here ever since--about 10 years now. My major interest was marketing, and computers were really just a hobby. However, like many others I caught the Internet entrepreneur An Internet Entrepreneur is a person that engages in business on the internet and helps to shape the future of business on the internet by being an innovator. One who is able to recognize opportunity and administer resources to take advantage of the opportunities. bug and set up a company with a partner in 1999. We started out by publishing a subscriber-based, bilingual, offshore tax and investment newsletter. Although it was popular, we had lots of requests to do offshore financial structuring, and moved into capital sourcing and deal making. That led to my interest in starting a business for myself, eventually in the IT field and in Search Engine Optimization. Originally I found out about SEO from the practical experience of promoting our publishing endeavors back in 1999. I did a lot of the work myself, after reading about how search engines work. While I have no formal computer education, I've always found there have been ample resources available to learn what's needed if you are truly dedicated. As I successfully promoted our Web sites, other people started asking me for help with their sites, and so my activities naturally evolved into SEO/Online Marketing consulting. What I quickly found out, however, was that many SEO tools available in the US just weren't able to handle double-byte Japanese Web sites. So I was forced to manually go through and optimize client sites. But as any webmaster will tell you, this is a long and tedious task, especially if it has to be frequently repeated due to new content being posted. So in my spare time, I came up with the idea of a Swiss Army Knife-type of integrated SEO tool and finally got to realize that idea last year. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Who are your competitors in SEO in Japan? There are quite a few SEO consulting companies Noun 1. consulting company - a firm of experts providing professional advice to an organization for a fee consulting firm business firm, firm, house - the members of a business organization that owns or operates one or more establishments; "he worked for a out there in Japan, probably over 100, but in terms of a competing software solution, I don't think we have any direct competitors. There are some freeware Software that is distributed without charge and which may be redistributed without charge by its users. However, ownership is retained by the developer who may change future releases from freeware to a paid product (feeware). See shareware, free software and public domain software. tools out there, but nothing that an end-user could say contains everything they need. The shareware Software on the "honor system." The concept is that users try a product, and if they like it, they voluntarily pay a set registration fee or make a donation to the program's creator. There are tens of thousands of shareware programs; some fantastic, some awful. typically requires software knowledge and does very specific things, such as measuring your page rank or checking a site for keyword density Keyword density is the percentage of words on a web page that match a specified set of keywords. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. . They are not integrated and they are not easy to use--indeed, they make SEO hard work. How would you describe your software? Is it an analysis tool, or do you also automatically modify the target home page as well? Well, the best analogy is to compare our product to a popular computerized car tune-up firm in Australia called Ultra-Tune. These guys allow a mechanic to hook the machine up to a car engine and analyze everything you'd want to know about the condition of that engine. Then it spits out a recommendation list of repairs and tunings that should be performed. Our product, SeoSpy[TM], is very similar in concept. It's a toolbox See toolkit and toolbar. for someone wanting to tune-up their Web site. But for car tune-up, you basically have to be a mechanic. What about for SeoSpy[TM]? Our strength is that SeoSpy[TM] can be used by the client's own novice Web site maintenance people, without any previous knowledge of SEO. The software comes with a very deep tutorial to allow clients to make a proper commitment to getting good SEO results. Also, the reports given by the software tell the user exactly what to do to boost one's SEO ranking--where to place specific keywords, for example. Given that your software is fully featured, is it difficult to install? Not at all. We've built it as an ASP application, meaning that apart from a web browser The program that serves as your front end to the Web on the Internet. In order to view a site, you type its address (URL) into the browser's Location field; for example, www.computerlanguage.com, and the home page of that site is downloaded to you. and Internet connection, nothing else is needed to access it. Plus, it's very simple to use and can be opened by multiple users on multiple machines on multiple operating systems Operating systems can be categorized by technology, ownership, licensing, working state, usage, and by many other characteristics. In practice, many of these groupings may overlap. , wherever you are in the world. The way you use it is that you log in to your SeoSpy[TM] account using your everyday Web browser, type in the URL URL in full Uniform Resource Locator Address of a resource on the Internet. The resource can be any type of file stored on a server, such as a Web page, a text file, a graphics file, or an application program. of the target site you want to optimize or analyze, then click on whichever functions you want to run. Output from SeoSpy[TM] comprises both optimization analysis and also recommendations. For example, it can tell you which tags you should add to your site and where to paste them. Do you have any customer testimonials to share? We have a translation company client who couldn't get themselves on the first page of an industry search for a relevant term such as "eigo honyaku service." After using SeoSpy[TM], and getting some consulting input from us, they are now usually in the top five to 10 results returned. Of course, the value to them is in the actual new business developed, and it's a numbers game. Since they are getting so many more visitors to their site, and because they show up on very specific searches, the quality and volume of actual inquiries coming through has really taken off. As a result, they're making real money. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Another client example is a language school, a Japanese company teaching English, Spanish, French and other languages. They're getting about two to five times more traffic now, and students are regularly signing up on line. These are regular mid-sized firms you're talking about, not just large brand-name companies? Exactly. Although we love to help brand-name companies as well, it's the small- to medium-sized enterprise firms (SMEs) that can get the most bang for the buck from a well-executed SEO program. We imagined that SEO would be expensive. But the price is amazingly cheap. It's all part of our strategy to set ourselves up as the default standard for SEO in Japan. We've kept the software side of things extremely low-cost, and a package typically starts at [Ren]30,000 a year per URL. If you were to compare this expense to ads in Internet media, for SMEs at least, the SEO value proposition is very compelling. We also have discount programs for people with a lot of URLs. That's a great price! Why have you been able to gain leadership in this niche in Japan? There are plenty of SEO software companies in the US. For foreign SEO companies, Japan is challenging. It's a combination of language issues--your software has to be able to support JIS JIS Japanese Industrial Standard JIS Jamaica Information Service JIS Juggling Information Service JIS Just in Sequence (automotive industry) JIS Jakarta International School JIS Joint Information System , Shift-JIS, and EUC--and awareness of how Japanese search engines work and rank pages. Foreign SEO firms see Japan as a tough nut, and as a result, they simply don't target the Japanese engines. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One example of how things are different, although this is probably more attributable to time lag, is the way SEO applications in the US have to stay in closer touch with the latest search engine trends. For example, Google in the US is now placing more ranking weight on semantics (the interrelationship in·ter·re·late tr. & intr.v. in·ter·re·lat·ed, in·ter·re·lat·ing, in·ter·re·lates To place in or come into mutual relationship. in of words to define the meaning and value of a document). In Japan, the engines don't use semantics yet, and the emphasis is more on keyword positioning, linking strategies, et cetera ET CETERA. A Latin phrase, which has been adopted into English; it signifies. "and the others, and so of the rest," it is commonly abbreviated, &c. 2. Formerly the pleader was required to be very particular in making his defence. (q.v. . So for a US SEO company, this would mean having to maintain multiple versions of a software package, keep abreast Verb 1. keep abreast - keep informed; "He kept up on his country's foreign policies" keep up, follow trace, follow - follow, discover, or ascertain the course of development of something; "We must follow closely the economic development is Cuba" ; "trace the of changes to multiple engines (for a complex language) in addition to the logistics of providing support to a totally foreign market. How complex are the calculations you use to get your optimization recommendations? More than just complexity, a significant issue is having a great deal of experience and experimentation in learning how Japanese search engines work, how they change and how to detect those changes. Part of our intellectual property is in having found out that because most search engines have so many variables, it's often better not to have to know them and think about them all. Instead, we let SeoSpy[TM] do the brunt of the work by averaging out the results from the vast amount of data coming in to our application every day, analyze any general changes or trends and then modify our algorithms accordingly. Needless to say, the weightings to get the right results are different for each engine. So rather than reverse engineer, we instead engage in automated analysis to yield patterns and gain a guideline to the right weightings--one for each major search engine target. Most people with Web sites imagine that SEO is all about knowing how many times to put a certain word into your page so that it will come up on the search engines--without inserting it too many times so that you get dumped for "loading" up the Web site on purpose. How do you find out what the threshold levels Noun 1. threshold level - the intensity level that is just barely perceptible intensity, intensity level, strength - the amount of energy transmitted (as by acoustic or electromagnetic radiation); "he adjusted the intensity of the sound"; "they measured the are? Most search engines have a page where people can lodge complaints about doctored pages, spammers, et cetera. Your competitors are watching your sites with eagle eyes and will quickly report you if they see anything strange going on. So to a certain extent, the industry is self-governing. The search engine people really do read this user feedback. Search engine spamming, as we in the industry call such doctoring, includes "doorway pages A Web page that is designed to appeal to search engine spiders that continually comb the Web looking for pages to index. Also known as a "bridge page" or "jump page," the doorway page contains words and phrases that make it more likely to be indexed by a greater number of search engines. ," "cloaked pages"--pages designed to be served to search engines but not to humans--and other search-bot sensitive techniques. It's a challenge for search engines to know what is spam and what isn't, and while automation of the process is improving, human involvement is still important. One of the ways we offer a measurable advantage to our clients is to use a tool within SeoSpy[TM] called the Spy Tool. This tool analyzes the top ranking sites among your competitors and tells you what they are doing to get those rankings. A nice point is that Spy Tool is search engine specific--you can find out exactly what you need to be well-ranked in Google versus MSN (1) (MicroSoft Network) A family of Internet-based services from Microsoft, which includes a search engine, e-mail (Hotmail), instant messaging (Windows Live Messaging) and a general-purpose portal with news, information and shopping (MSN Directory). , which has a different algorithm and needs different tweaking tweaking Vox populi Fine-tuning to produce optimal results . Are Japanese web owners aware of the value of SEO to their marketing strategy? Yes, and there is a demand for SEO knowledge. In a recent issue of the popular Web Designing magazine, the editors did a survey of web designers, asking them what the number one skill was that they wanted to learn. The most desirable skill, equal first with Flash, was SEO. My guess is that this newfound new·found adj. Recently discovered: a newfound pastime. Adj. 1. newfound - newly discovered; "his newfound aggressiveness"; "Hudson pointed his ship down the coast of the newfound sea" demand for SEO skill is probably driven by customer demand, but there's room for growth. Two weeks ago we launched a new service called Spidermatic[TM], which is a free service to automatically track search engine bots bots maggots of flies which infest animals, especially horses and sheep. The term bot is also loosely used to include the invasive maggots such as those of Cuterebra and Wohlfahrtia spp. horse bots see gasterophilus. (spiders) visiting your site. We expect a reasonable amount of exposure in the Japanese media The communications media of Japan include numerous television and radio networks as well as newspapers and magazines. For the most part, television networks were established based on the capital contribution from existing radio networks at that time. . You also supply SEO consulting, correct? We have gained an enormous amount of expertise in both English and Japanese SEO, and while we service a growing number of requests for SEO consulting, our main focus is on our SeoSpy[TM] online service. RELATED ARTICLE: HOW SEOSPY[TM] WORKS Our practical experience here at JI with search engine optimization (SEO) is that apart from focused advertising, money and time invested in better placements on search engines is probably the best single use of marketing funds. In our example, the launch of www.japan.com in July of 2003 brought us about 2,500 unique visitors A count of how many different people access a Web site. For example, if a user leaves and comes back to the site five times during the measurement period, that person is counted as one unique visitor, but would count as five "user sessions. a day, thanks to the great URL and the portal nature of the site content. Our SeoSpy[TM] trial By John Dodd John Dodd may refer to:
After some intensive manual SEO work (wished we'd had SeoSpy[TM]!), Japan.com started appearing on Google and other major search engines around September of 2003. Not long after, our visitor traffic started to rise, and by February 2004, just five months later, we were receiving 9,000 unique visitors a day--a startling star·tle v. star·tled, star·tling, star·tles v.tr. 1. To cause to make a quick involuntary movement or start. 2. To alarm, frighten, or surprise suddenly. See Synonyms at frighten. 350 percent increase--all without any advertising beyond our own publications. So we know that SEO works. We asked Sozon to analyze our sister company, DaiJob Inc.'s www.daijob.com site. Here's their advice: 1. Take the low hanging fruit first! There are several, very specific search terms that others in your industry are not optimizing--but that represent a good percentage of available traffic. 2. The DaiJob site is comprised of several categories with many of its pages being generated on the fly. Consider using a more static type of URL for each category's "top" (index) pages and then further optimizing the content on each of these "top" pages, so that it will rank well when users do a category-specific search. 3. While it's obvious the current DaiJob team have done a great job of SEO on most of the key pages, a lot of your dynamic pages could benefit from more specific <TITLE> tags as well as the inclusion of <META> tags. (The importance of the <META> tags will likely become more evident when Yahoo Japan switches to using its own internal engine, as opposed to the Google-based result sets we are seeing at the moment.) 4. Consider separating your JavaScript into a separate .JS file. This will allow search engine spiders to crawl your site more efficiently, save bandwidth for both you and the search engine spiders--and is considered good "spider-quette." (This applies to CSS/Style Sheets too.) RELATED ARTICLE: WHAT SEOSPY[TM] DOES * Page Analyzer: Quickly check to see how well-optimized a page is. * Page Optimizer: Automatically generate optimized tags for your site. * Quick Rank: Check your site's rank simultaneously across multiple engines. * Power Rank: An in-depth rank-finding tool. * Quick Compare: Quickly compare your site against any other URL. * Spy Tool: A multi-purpose tool that lets you spy on the top-ranking Web sites to quickly discover exactly how to beat them. * SWF See Flash. (filename extension) swf - /S W F/ The filename extension for Adobe Shockwave Flash animated vector graphics files, common on the World-Wide Web. A rarely used alternative expansion is "Small Web Format". Analysis: Analyze any online FLASH (.swf) file to see how well optimized it is. * SWF to HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. : View your FLASH (.swf) files just as a search engine would to discover how you can improve their search engine compatibility. * Report Tool: Select a URL and some keywords and let SeoSpy[TM] automatically scan the search enginess and find your site's rank. A new report is generated every month and all your ranking data is stored in a very easy to see format so you can track your improvements over time. * Use it anywhere: You can use SeoSpy[TM] from your home or office, and there is no need to store any data on your own PC. * Platform independent: Because there is no need to install anything on your own PC, SeoSpy[TM] will work on any computer with an Internet browser See Web browser. (e.g., Internet Explorer Microsoft's Web browser, which comes with Windows starting with Windows 98. Commonly called "IE," versions for Mac and Unix are also available. Internet Explorer is the most widely used Web browser on the market. It has also been the browser engine in AOL's Internet access software. , Opera, Netscape) and Internet connection. Simply log in at www.seospy.com [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, a few symbols, and control characters. Originally designed for teletype operations, it has found wide application in computers. ] |
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