Unlike my other in bullets posts this is actually going to require that you really know how Naver works, the layout and functionality change the ball game a lot here and I’m going to write a small introduction to Naver before getting into the comparative bullets a little further down. After all to understand how to SEO this goliath of the Asian search market you need to understand how the thing works. I guess the easiest way to think of it is Google’s Universal Search on steroids; meets a social network meets well referenced uni paper and a lot of manual moderation thrown in.
To quickly illustrate just how insanely complicated Naver is I’ve borrowed (pinched) an image from Search Engine Watch.
Essentially the reason Naver looks so complicated is down to the lack of Korean web content, there being so little of it that they believe they can just show everything worth showing on a single page.
This is as far into the introduction as I’m going to go as plenty of other people have written about this and I personally believe the best way to learn about this sort of thing is to go and play with the Search Engine itself. And you will need to do this a lot, because it takes a while to get your head around the search engine itself. So the best use of time is essentially optimising your social accounts to get those ranking this is not SEO in the traditional sense by any means.
Soooooooo….. The Actual Bullets
• Social for SEO is instrumental, but like Baidu it is a different animal, in fact this is going to need a post all to itself (I’ll link to it from here once I’ve actually written something). In fact is really the big hitter here.
• You need to make use of the Q&A section this makes up a large part of the search results – you have no choice you need to actually be an active member of the community and be knowledgeable on the subject matter.
• Build a Naver Café, think mini blog, good posts will make it into the SERPs.
• Remember most sites in the Naver SERPs are essentially shit in terms of traditional SEO
• Remember the 1st sections of the SERPs aren’t always for sites, but for content you create on the SE’s own products.
• Yes link building is still important (I wouldn’t normally say this in my “in bullets” posts, but everything else about this SE is so odd it seems it’s worth saying. Just box clever here as always.
• Style it like a Korean site – get you user signals right (awful code and heavy use of flash is ok) make the site really busy, basically everything you would do to make your site look good for a western market do the opposite.
• Don’t neglect the Daum Café
• Having lots of landing pages for similar products seems to help
• Get your keywords in your content/titles/everywhere, higher density than western SE’s but don’t stuff
• Think USER no point in trying to be really detailed in your onsite architecture, at least not for Naver it will help Daum though
• Give it Korean content, generate good Korean content Naver have openly said they don’t have enough web content in Korean so think how soft the market is, produce good copy and your winning half the battle. So, I guess that last point is good content is important, well no duh right?
• Despite what I said about a lot of the sites being poor and Naver letting them get away with it, try to make it easy for the Naver spider to get through your site, odds are otherwise you could lose long tail as it isn’t great at actually indexing things. This is quite important albeit not for the heavy hitting terms as odds are it will find those landing pages.
• Remember there are multiple algorithms in Naver so you need to appeal to them all in different ways, so there is no catch all solution you will essentially have to optimise several different things to capitalise in Naver.