Spiderman: the Web wizard of Japanese search engine optimization.(Feature)(Cover Story)

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, which has a different algorithm and needs different tweaking.

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 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 (spiders) visiting your site. We expect a reasonable amount of exposure in the Japanese media.

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 day, thanks to the great URL and the portal nature of the site content.

Our SeoSpy[TM] trial

By John Dodd

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 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