Sergio Kajirian and Patrick Kajirian offer advice on opening a business in Japan. They relate their experiences opening a branch office of PEK Interactive in Japan and talk about web development and search engine optimization in Japan.

See the case study on the JETRO website – http://www.jetro.org/content/408

Business Week published an excellent article regarding the future of internet usage. It focused on how people in Korea and Japan use their cell phones rather than home or computer’s to interact online. It also discussed WIMAX the broadband cell phone technology that allows beaming of tv content and movies to cell phones.

The Open Directory Project also called DMOZ has been down for a week. The forms to submit a site are not working.

DMOZ is used by Google as its directory. So for sites that want to rank well organically in Google, it is important to be listed.

The DMOZ garners a lot of criticism because it takes so long to be included or that it is reported that DMOZ editors accept bribes to include sites in their human edited directory.

A great tool for checking out new sites (and wasting time) is the StumbleUpon Firefox extension. After you download and register, then choose the genre of sites that you like to view. Then when you hit the Stumble! button on the Firefox toolbar, a new site will appear. You can find sites that are recommended by other registered users. Its a great way to discover new sites that wouldn’t come up in the search engine search results and that are organized around genres. You can also view profiles and recommended site by “stumblers” or community members.

Prioritizing Web Usability Jacob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger’s new book present design principles that increase web usability. This is an easy read luckily because I was so amazed by all the information presented that I read some of the chapters twice.

One point that amazed me was about scrolling. According to their research only 23% of users scroll down a website’s content. If users enter a site from the search engine, they will scan what is visable — without scrolling — if they don’t see what they are looking for, they click on the back button on the browser and return to the search engine results.

Regarding site design, they recommend:

• Support short visits; be a snack [to the information hunters].
• Encourage users to return; use strategies such as newsletters as reminders.
• Emphasize search engine visibility and other ways of increasing frequent visits by addressing users’ immediate needs.

This makes sense with the research results showing that web users do not have the patience to scroll anymore.

This book is excellent. I can’t write everything I learned here–there is not enough space. I highly recommend it to other web design and online marketing professionals.

Bill Hartzer posted an excellent article at WebProNews about SEO for corporate websites. He goes over the most important items, including: the home page, product pages, news, articles, leadership and ROI.

Although your corporate website does not allow customers to purchase products or services online, your company can benefit greatly from optimizing your website for the search engines. Ranking well in the search engine results will not only increase your business’s brand awareness, it will bring increased sales leads, which will lead to increased ROI from your corporate website.

First, he recommended that the corporate homepage have paragraphs of text and links to the most important pages in the site.

Second, the article mentions that on the product and services pages, each page should be unique. These pages should also include several paragraphs of text with targeted keywords in that text.

Product or services pages can help bring in sales leads for your company. When potential customers are looking for a product or service the company sells, they typically turn to search engines. When they find your product or services page listed in the search engines, the visitor will come directly to your product or service page. They’ll typically take a few seconds to glance at what you have to offer; its at that time when you need to give them some sort of action to take.

Mr. Hartzer also argues that the company news and events pages are an important way to increase brand awareness and generate leads. He makes a great recommendation about trade shows:

Oftentimes people search at the search engines for trade shows they’re going to attend. By including separate web pages about each trade show the company is going to attend or exhibit at, there’s a good chance that people searching for that trade show in the search engines will see the page on the corporate website mentioning the fact that the company is attending; this can lead to company and brand awareness as well as potential sales leads. If someone is searching for the trade show then they’re interested in that particular industry; so those types of visitors to your corporate site are extremely targeted and valuable.

Corporate websites offer an excellent way to market the company as an industry leader. Including articles from the company’s experts will increase the website’s credibility. Additionally having information about the company’s executives is helpful for those who search for this information. Each leadership page should have it unique title and description.

The article’s concluding paragraph is a must read for corporate or “in-house” SEO:

By making a few changes to your corporate website that dont sacrifice its quality and good looks, you can make your corporate website pay for itself by turning it into a serious lead generation tool. Not only will your corporate website be found at the top of the search results, it will be seen as an industry leader and start to show up everywhere for your company’s most important keyword phrases, the phrases related to your products and services. And not only will the corporate website be found more often in the search engines, it will increase your company’s brand awareness.

Google announced in the Google Sitemaps blog an improved interface, more tools for webmasters and a notification area explaining to site owners of potential problems with their website that could draw penalties.

The new interface and reporting is an improvement. The new “indexing snapshot” provides:

• If site is in the index
• When Googlebot last accessed the home page
• If some pages of the site are partially indexed
• If the home page is currently inaccessible
• If Googlebot has encountered a large number of errors when trying to crawl the site

There is also a new webmaster help center. It includes a central place for webmasters to get more information about Googles guidelines, details on Googlebot, ranking, indexing and about sitemaps.

Interestingly Google has added a section that notifies webmasters if their site is in a violation of Google guidelines that may result in penalties. While I hope to never find any messages there, I applaud Google trying to improve its relationship with the webmaster community more. I think that the latest improvements will generate goodwill.