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By Patrick Abotsi

So you are about to launch a new site targeting Chinese customers, or add a Chinese version to your current site for the Middle Kingdom, and don’t know where to start your seo strategy. Far from being a complete reference, this article gives you eight quick tips that will get you started on the long march to your internet success in China and top position in the country’s current leading search Engine, Baidu.

“…for Baidu the internal links carry a lot of weight.”

Bear in mind that as far as the fundamentals are concerned, search engine in China is not an alien species. Yes keyword-rich content, link popularity, title and meta-tag keyword optimization, keyword in your domain name and other SEO tricks and methods can also be applied to Baidu, although the importance of each may differ substantially when compared to Google or other major global search engines.

1 - Get a China Top-Level Domain (.cn, .com.cn, .net.cn etc.). If possible, you should also get the Chinese-character top level domain corresponding to your main keyword.

2 - Use your keyword in your url. Baidu seems to give even more importance than Google to keyword presence in your web address.

3 - Host your site in China. You should consider having your new website or your new sub-domain hosted in China and get registered (ICP). This will also ensure not having your site banned down the road (in case your current hosting company overseas also host sites detrimental to China resulting in its IP being blocked and becoming inaccessible from China).

4 - Get your site translated in Chinese by professionals. Very few searches are conducted in English on Baidu, and English pages or sites rank usually very low compared to sites in Chinese. On the other hand, you are trying to reach an audience that basically would be using only Chinese for searches, even for the highly educated segment. Make sure to have your site translated BY HUMANS and make sure to double check it by a third-party.

5 - Optimize your meta-tags. In Chinese. Due to abuse of the system the importance of meta-tags has been devalued by all the major international search engines. For Baidu it is still VERY relevant. Do not overlook it.

6 - Maximize the use of your inbound links anchor text. While Google discount internal links and gives more weight to external links with the keywords in the anchor text, for Baidu the internal links carry a lot of weight.

7 - Get as many links as possible. Google emphasizes quality over quantity when it comes to the links importance for a website ranking, but Baidu has less requirements on the link source authority. So even lower quality links can help your rankings.


Above, the Chinese Search Engine, Baidu’s site submission page (at Baidu.com) is shown… TIP: Use Google Translate to translate the page into english by entering its URL and choosing “Chinese to English.” - [Ed.]

8 - Submit your site to Baidu. Use http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html to do it.

Hope these quick eight tips will help you start your Baidu optimization. We will be writing very soon on more specific aspects on search engine optimization in China and giving Baidu-specific SEO tips.

About the Author: Patrick Abotsi is a Shanghai-based SEO consultant, and president of the [http://www.seo4china.com]Chinese internet marketing firm Sinovantage International. He writes about search engines news and development on the company’s blog, [http://www.seo4china.com/blog]China SEO Blog

Article Source: EzineArticles.com