Search engines have always been powerful tools to find out anything you don't already know.
Why Baidu? or the Chinese Search Engines?
Google has always be the number one (or the mostly used) search engine in the global world, or at least in the majority of the countries in the world. But in China, Baidu is the most popular search engine which has been leading the second, third and fourth search engines with quite a big gap - They are 360's so.com, Sogou.com (Tencent owned), Alibaba's sm.cn (a mobile only Chinese search engine).
Still nowadays more than 97% of the Chinese population are using search engines in China for work purposes. Imagine if your website is ranking high up on Baidu's organic search results pages, shouldn't your site get a lot of web traffic?
Besides it is a Chinese search engine, there is something special about Baidu - Founded as a company in the year 2000 by Robin Li, with Baidu a search engine technology that was patented. In the early years, it was believed Baidu's first patch of users mostly came through many local Chinese Internet cafes' computers. In the computers, the web browsers (some very early versions of Internet Explorer) were pre-bookmarked with some yellow pages websites (i.e. "entrance pages of the Chinese Internet") which have Baidu's search box pre-installed.
Wherever there is huge tons of web traffic (e.g. Baidu search engine), there are always websites who want it! To get the search engine traffic, you will have to figure out how to rank high up on Baidu's search results pages - This process has long been known as search engine optimization (SEO), or to be more specific in China, Chinese SEO. Then there is the need for experts to practice SEO in China.
SEO in China
Here are a few points for doing well with SEO for the Chinese market:
1. Language: Get the language right. Baidu is a search engine for simplified Chinese. You can put up a website in entire English, your site will probably do well in Google with some optimization, but the best for Baidu is still in simplified Chinese. Even for the Chinese users, they prefer a website in Chinese (i.e. they own language).
2. Search applications: Search applications integrate many criteria in mobile surfers to identify page rank. In short, they involve overall web page efficiency, data transfer amount and display rendering. To take full advantage of mobile web search, a fully mobile optimized web page (i.e. HTML5 page) that extends all functionality and key articles from a web page will achieve greater positions in search results than a web page that has basically been reformatted for a smaller display.
3. Focus on Mobile: Company must make sure their web pages stand out in a crowded market by translating conventional web SEO methods to mobile. Typical SEO tactics may not always work well in the mobile environment. For example, put your appropriate keywords in headlines and text. Consumers use their mobile phones for more focused and task-oriented searches, perhaps for a particular vacation destination or product. This is different from how most individuals when using a desktop computer.
4. Analytics: Use the appropriate analytics to collect your web visitors' behavior data. By understanding visitors' behavior, companies can anticipate queries and integrate keywords into web page textual articles. This will improve better recognition from Baidu. Google Analytics has always been a great analytics tool for many websites, and it is a free tool. If you require collecting data beyond the capabilities of Google Analytics such as heat maps, click maps, or more, you may have to also consider using other analytics tools alongside Google Analytics.
5. Rich snippets: Baidu uses many more dynamic and extensive rich snippets when compared to any other search engines. This is how rich snippets are displayed on Baidu: From the aesthetic perspective, Baidu utilizes the vertical boxes by using the various link and other interactive apps which includes JavaScript. On top of that, Baidu may use 70% of a single page for housing the company’s properties (including Baidu Zhidao, Baidu Tieba, Baidu Wenku, Baidu Baike, etc), this doesn't leave much room for the rest, and having some rich snippets for your company must be great.
6. Simple URLs: The targeted keywords on each page are the main focus of the On-page optimization to get the higher page rank. The URLs need no special characters, bracket, symbol, commas, or any other characters that may make the URLs too complicated for Baidu to understand. Alphabets and numeric should be used in the URLs.
A Great Guide - The Next Steps
There are many other items I have not included in this article but would have given a site improvement in Chinese search engines' ranking.
What are the next steps?
Step 1: A free guide on Baidu optimization
Here is a great guide for Baidu search engine optimization that will help you start with your understanding to Chinese search engines.
Step 2: Get this book for advanced SEO
Once you have acquired the basic tips to rank your website for Baidu, go one step further - You can do so by reading this book.
Step 3: Further reading on the web
Here are more resources for SEO and Analytics.
SEO Training & Services
SEO Tools
Analytics Info & Learning
Comments
Post a Comment