Capital Hosting

Japan is a unique country for so many reasons. Its culture and its people are like nowhere else in the World, and the same thing applies to the Japanese Internet. A consequence of that is that SEO techniques used in Japan tend to be largely different from what you would see in Westerner countries.

Let's analyze, one by one, some of the most common link building tactics and see how well they perform in Japan:

Blog commenting: most of the Japanese blogs are hosted on subdomains of a few free blog providers. External and customized blogs are fairly rare. It means that even if you do comment a lot, the actual number of domains linking to your site will be small, reducing the effect of this type of links. Don't spend too much of your SEO time on it

Forums: simply put, they just don't exist in Japan. You have a few so-called message boards, that will occasionally let you drop your URL, without choice of anchor. Again, not the best strategy to rely on

Social bookmarks: there are a couple of decent social bookmarking sites to support your SEO efforts in Japan. They help for indexing and sending a bit of juice, but once again not a big thing. Digg-likes on their side are yet to be found on the land of the rising sun...

Social networking: the big players in Japan are called Mixi, Mobage and Gree, and few of their pages are actually even indexable by search engines. These are good sites for your online marketing efforts, but the SEO effects are low

Article/PR sites: there a few of them, usually specialized in a niche. Find 2-3 of them, write really good contents and they should provide you with a few good backlinks

Directories: few of them are truly active and of quality, but don't neglect them. They can be good to create links to your inner pages and add variety to your general link profile

Link exchange: it works pretty well if you can find related websites in your nice. Probably one of the most efficient tactics to day

Conclusion: as you can see, most of the common SEO tactics don't work all that well here in Japan. In my experience, what works best is creating a good relationship with people in your industry and kindly asks them for a link, as well as your business partners. Japanese people rely a lot on their personal network. You should also focus your energy in writing good, unique and entertaining contents on your blog. Good, contextual, relevant backlinks work more than ever for your Japanese SEO.

By Anthony De Teixeira, a web marketing consultant living in Osaka and specializing in SEO in Japan. His agency, Gaijin Web, also offers web design, translation and business consulting services in Japan.