Submitting my Japanese language site to Yahoo brought me to the SiteExplorer page. It seems to be something like Google’s Webmaster Tools. Once you are logged in with your Yahoo! Japan idea, you can submit a site to site explorer. It asks you to either upload an HTML page or put a meta tag in the header in order to verify your ownership of the sites. Once that’s done you can see how many sites are registered. I haven’t played extensively with it yet, but it’s nice just to see that Yahoo! Japan knows I exist right now.
The top of the site has three tags. One is the main page of the site. The second is a way to put a Yahoo Search on your homepage,a nd the third contains a lot of information from basics such as what a robots.txt is. There’s one section that contains information about improving your ranking. I will dig into that as much as I can during the next few days.
For the record, you need Japanese ability to do this, but not much. I think if you just sort of guess, you can probably register a site on Yahoo! Japan this way. The question of whether it is beneficial to have an English language site up on Yahoo! Japan has any benefit. I’ll let you know in the coming weeks.
In my next SEO Japan entry, I’ll go through the process of submitting a site to a category on Yahoo Japan.