By Guest Author Bonjung Gooon on her Open SEO blog.

Naver has the biggest share in the Korean search market:

(1) Naver    (2) Daum   (3) Google Korea & Yahoo! Korea

While I’m dealing with Korean clients who are looking for expanding their sales to the world through internet, I meet lots of foreign clients who eagerly want their website or brand to be exposure to Korean web users. Each case has to focus on SEO discipline, but details would be completely different, because the Korean search engine environment is dissimilar from others in lots of dimensions.

Koreans’ concept of a search engine is different from those world wide, so does websites which they constantly visit. Koreans don’t know what twitter, delicious, and LinkedIn are. Worldwide web users don’t know about café, Knowledge-in, DC inside as well. There are big gaps between them.

Here are some of tips for you who are looking for right SEO campaign in Korea.

Korea Dominant Search Engines – Naver & Daum (Next post – ed.)

Ask worldwide web users. “What is the most popular search engine?” They would say “Google” or “Yahoo!” But when it comes to Korea, you may hardly hear of those names.

See the search volume share in Korea. Naver shares 74.47% of search engine market, and Daum(14.47%), Yahoo! Korea(4.04%), Google Korea (1.53%) follow it. While Naver dominates search engine market in Korea, Daum also takes important place in korea search engine environment. You can’t ignore it, because Daum has unique features(Agora, Bloger new, etc.) and loyal website members. But for today, I’ll focus on Naver (I’ll post about Daum soon).

What makes Naver so popular in Korea?

What kind of services do Korean web users want?

Koreans would think of Naver not just as a search engine sites, but also as portal site which contains full of various contents and useful platforms. Koreans are used to search and stay just in one domain which contains lots of members and service so that they don’t have to go somewhere else. They love to be with majority. They think ‘The more people stay, the more information is there.

Following are some noticeable and popular platforms of Naver:

Knowledge iN(Answers)

It played main role to bring Naver’s initial popularity. Naver sets up “Knowledge iN” in 2002, enabling Koreans to help each other in a type of real-time question-and-answer platform. On average, 44,000 questions are posted each day with about 110,000 returned answers. Even Google has benchmarked it for making Question & Answers service in Russia.

Animated home page

Naver has a more visual, more eye-catching home page.

Recently Google Korea is trying to follow a Korean trend.

Integrated Search results

Naver’s organic search result and PPC result come from Yahoo!’s. (Daum’s comes from Google’s). When you enter keyword “beef” on search tab, you will see keyword advertising (CPC, CPM), blog, café, answers, news, organic result, shopping info, video, image, etc. all in 1 long page. Korean want to see all the information at a look and reach it quickly.

For a successful SEO campaign, you should focus not just in ranking, but also impression in various verticals.

Well organized social media in Naver:  Café & Blog

One of features of Korean web users is to voluntarily participate to write contents, make communities, ask questions and answer themselves by on purpose of commercial or interest. In Naver, you can easily make community(café) and blog. You may be not familiar with concept of Café. It is kind of community sites which have mambership account. Each individual web users can make their own cafe in Naver or Daum just like how they open blog. And they make some bulletin board, image board, comment board etc. to attract web users who have same interest. They become cafe members to share their knowledge, information, experience and more. (Example of Cafe)

Blog, Cafe & Answers’s performance in Korea search engine depends on title, description and popularity.

Korean SEO tip : SMO is just as important as Organic SEO.

As I mentioned, you can see lots of verticals in one page. It means your brand can be seen several times by users in various vertical. You have to make full use of it. Blog, Café, Knowledge In can make a difference. Put your effort in improving web visibility of those, while optimizaing organic search result and users interface in your website.

Well begun is half done. Now you know how the Korean search engine Naver works and Korean web users play, so get ready to  start your SEO campaign.

Part II will look at the #2 Korean search engine Daum.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Global, Guest Authors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.