Threaded Mode | Linear Mode

lowfriction963 · 04-28-2014, 11:09 AM

Hi Y!A,

I'm a designer living in Japan and have recently started building websites but found it difficult to SEO in general.

I host my websites on Yahoo Small Business servers and have used their Search Engine Submission feature several times to submit my websites to Google, Yahoo, etc. over the course of two years.

When I type in the company names into Google, the websites come up no problem. When I type the company names in Japanese into Google, some websites come up, but mostly only the Contact Page (not the front main page) will come up. Why is that?

And it's worse when I type only keywords (not the company name)... my clients' websites do not show up in searches even if I type in the city name! Strangely enough, the company websites may show up because of external blogs or keywords from other websites... but not a direct hit on their website...

I have heard rumors that using a Japanese server is better? Or using a Japanese domain extension (.jp or .co.jp) is better than (.com or .net) since our target customers are in Japan? Is this true?

Here is the source code that I am using in the head of my index.html

==========

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="ja" lang="ja">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Welcome to ABC123</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="ABC123, City Name, Japan, etc."></meta>
<meta name="description" content="ABC123 is the best! etc."></meta>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp,noydir"></meta>
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">

==========

Obviously, my clients would like to have their webpage come up on top (or at least on the first page). What am I missing? Should I keep submitting my websites to the search engines? Build social media pages to increase the number of relevant links? Or is the only sure-fire way is to pay for that top spot?

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for all your time.

Cheers!