A common misconception is that if you are targeting English speakers on your website, the only language you require is English… Not entirely. Here is a big reason to have a bilingual website in both Japanese and English.

Localization or the Location and or Language of the location you target matters — to the search engines.

As you may know, the search engines such as Google and Yahoo favor the web pages closer to the location where the search user is, and the web pages in the language spoken where the search user is. This is true even if the keyword is written in English. To put it bluntly you should be considering having both languages on your site even though your only business comes from English speakers in Japan because more often than not their results will be effected by their location. Localize your website in Japanese and you will have better results for your English keywords for Search Engines in Japan.

What are Tags?

Tags are essentially a grouping tool. Blogs include a tag system which allows you to add keywords to a post. Using the same tags on various posts helps group posts together under the tag name. The purpose of tags is to provide easier navigation to articles of similar content. This helps particularly when a blog or site has a lot of content.

Will tags improve my SEO?

It is widely believed that tags are a great way to improve SEO. The reason for this is it helps search engine spiders crawl the site and link related content. In saying this, a blog must have its related content grouped and tagged correctly for this to help. Search engines like google will create and list a single tag as a page on the listing. This is great for getting good results on long tail keywords which have little competition on the search engine. There can be negatives to using tags. For example excessive links in a tag cloud on your site could incur penalties and using huge groups of keywords will weaken the strength of other keywords on the page so it is sometimes not wise to include cloud tags everywhere.

What keywords should I tag?

You should always use keywords that you think you will re-use in the future. The reason being you don’t want a post which uses only one tag and then a tag page with the same content duplicated on it. Duplicate content is not good and therefore try to use the same tag many times. At least 3 times per tag is a good practice. Remember people don’t enter long keyword chains into search engines. 1 – 3 words in length is great for a tag.

How many tags should I use?

Less than 6 tags per post or page is plenty. Remember to relate them to the content in the article.

When you create new blog posts or pages with your Japan Web Start website it is important to consider using effective titles for SEO.

Well written titles can mean the difference when search engines list your pages. Good titles for SEO should be legible and communicate the content of the page but also contain the keywords of your choice.

Short titles are good for targeting one keyword and long titles provide more scope. Be careful not to make your titles too long. This can be seen as negative. I like the rule. If it seems unnatural to you, don’t do it. Listing a few important key words in the title is a good SEO technique but keep it targeted and specific. If you write natural and descriptive titles for SEO using specific keywords, you should be fine.