How do you optimise your website for search engine users in China? Baidu has the largest share of search engine traffic in China (70%-80%), with Google back in 2nd place with around 20%, so if you sell in China it is important that you rank well in Baidu. If your site is also important to Western internet users then you won’t want your Baidu SEO activity to do anything to impact its effectiveness elsewhere.

I have recently done some research into Baidu, as I am currently building a website that will need good Chinese Search Engine ranking, but found it difficult to differentiate between sound, proven advice and the hypothetical, anecdotal kind of evidence found in forums  that is difficult to substantiate. In addition, much of the information I found was written a couple of years ago – this is a huge time in the internet search engine world, and so much could have changed to render any advice irrelevant today.

So, what do you do? From the research I have done there do appear to be a few important points….

Baidu Search Engine Hints and Tips

1. Baidu attaches importance to a lot of the same things as Google (e.g. URL structure, page titles, header tags), therefore if you have addressed these points on your website already then you should be wll on the way to getting well ranked in Baidu too;
2. The Baidu Search Engine is not as effective as Google in working out the quality value of links, and so more emphasis is placed on quantity of inbound links rather than where those links come from. This could be an issue if you only have a certain budget / time available for link building for your site – do you focus your efforts on finding fewer, higher-quality links to suit Google, or do you just go for quantitity to rank better on Baidu? I would go for the quality route as, over time, Baidu is bound to put effort into delivering higher relevance SERPs to protect its market share;
3. Baidu still attaches ranking relevance to META Description and META Keywords, whereas Google no longer does. So, if you haven’t bothered with these tags in your pages it might be worth taking another look;
4. Baidu is sensitive to the use of certain words and phrases (such as adult content and words on the government block list) that might get your entire site removed from their index;
5. Baidu isn’t just for Chinese language websites. Your website will still be indexed by Baidu if it is in English, but it’s worth knowing that most Chinese Baidu users will search in Chinese, therefore incorporating simple Chinese into your web pages will be a good thing;
6. Baidu won’t necessarily find and index your website on its own. Use this link to submit your website to the Baidu search engine.
7. Advantage may be gained by hosting your website within China, but this may also impact its search-engine visibility and performance elsewhere in the world;

We’ll add anything else as we find it. Please give us your own tips too!

Take a look at some of our other Polls – we’re trying not to go bonkers with them!

If you use other poll or survey software on your site, let us know how you are finding it.

So, in summary, don’t automatically assume that the best place to link to from external websites is your home page. Think about where the visitor is coming from in the link and try to give them the most appropriate landing page.

…why not put really interesting, well-written and original content on your website so that other sites link to you because you’re worth linking to? Write articles yourself, focusing on your skills and experiences, and place them on your site so that your visitors can freely access them (i.e. without asking people to register first – don’t forget that search engines cannot log in / register on your site). Try not to copy what others have already written – a different viewpoint to the norm can often bring extra traffic. Do build your keywords and phrases into your articles, but don’t do it to the detriment of the overall article – don’t forget, the objective of this particular exercise is make your content attractive to real, human readers.

Once you have created some great articles, why not start adding teasers on some of the well used networking and article sites (I would recommend Business-Scene for this purpose, although there are of course others – it is free, gets lots of traffic and its content is well-indexed) . This should hopefully bring some good traffic on its own, but might also encourage those readers to add a link to you from their own websites.

Adding articles will also give the search engines more content from your site to add to their indexes.

Recently, I was writing an assessment report for a potential client on how he might improve the amount of organic search engine traffic reaching his family of websites. I had a look at the keywords that were already resulting in traffic finding one of his sites and I was surprised to see a whole bunch of culinary-related phrases had resulted in quite a bit of traffic over time. The reason this was surprising was that the website was essentially nothing to do with cooking, food, recipes or anything like that. There were, however, some articles submitted that supported the main theme of the site, but which also included mention of these culinary terms.

As a result of this ‘discovery’ we are considering more comprehensive coverage of this foody theme on the site and ways in which we can convert those visitors into customers for the main website.

It is difficult to get top search engine positions for the keywords you really want, but sometimes looking at things in reverse like this can create some good opportunities, and it is quite possible to use unlikely content which has brought your traffic in to draw visitors across to, what is for you, the main reason for them being there. Food for thought perhaps?

There are a number of ways to find out what keywords people are using to find your site. All website statistics programs ought to show you. Personally, I prefer using Google Analytics.

Some search engines also use nofollow as a way of recognising paid links (which they dislike). If you have any links on your site which are paid for by the target website, you might want to think about adding a rel=nofollow to the html links. Without nofollow on your links, there is a chance that search engines may penalise you by reducing your page rank value, thereby relegating you in the Search Engine results. You will still give the target site some traffic, but they will not benefit in terms of link value (link juice).

The ‘nofollow’ cause is a just one – search engine companies believe in the natural selection and promotion of websites in SERPs based on content and relative popularity within the internet community. If you have a website that lots of other popular websites link to, then that is a sign that yours is a valuable resource. The nofollow attribute helps prevent paid advertisers from distorting those results.

I only created my Twitter profile a few weeks ago.

Why, you may ask, after having created a Business Networking website (and therefore knowing the importance of growing networks and building relationships) and having had a keen interest in building website traffic for many years, have I been so slow accepting Twitter? After all, it is a free opportunity to get to know (virtually) more people, to develop relationships with them, and an additional marketing channel for your products and services, a mechanism for asking for help and to help others, and a way to drive traffic to your weblogs and websites.

I have been a little slow on the take-up because I have been busy with other things (and so perhaps did not consider that I needed it) and also because I have been sceptical that the cost to me (in terms of time spent tweeting, reading, responding) to develop its potential would be much higher than the return it would ultimately provide.

For me, the jury is still out, but then it is early days. I try to tweet once or twice a day, and I only post things that I genuinely find interesting, and which I think that others will also find of interest. Of course, only time will tell if others do find my tweets interesting, and I guess that I will adapt over time to deliver more of what gets the best results.

I’m still experimenting with Twitter to see what works, but Neil Ryder, who has been tweeting for just a few weeks longer than I have, has posted a great blog entry on what he learnt in his first 2 weeks. I found this to be both an interesting read and a useful guide to where I might look to make Twitter more successful for me, and thoroughly recommend you take a look.

I can also recommend Why you need Twitter, a blog post by Penelope Else, a really nicely written post on why you need to understand Twitter from the inside (which might explain why I have taken so long to get in).

I’m interested in knowing who to follow. How do I choose from the millions of twitterers out there? This got me thinking. Wouldn’t it be fun to come up with a tool that worked out a kind of twitter popularity score, based upon the loose concept that a person might be a worthwhile follow if they had acquired more followers than they were themselves following, or if they had a high ratio of followers to the number of tweets that they made. If I could bring this to the attention of the twitter community, who in turn visited my website to play with the tool and see where they were in the league table of, well, ‘interesting’, then I would be well on my way to achieving a goal of delivering more website traffic plus understanding more about Twitter itself, and I might even pick up a few followers along the way.

Well, after a couple of days fiddling about, the tool (just for fun, you understand) is ready. You can see it here. Please go and take a look, and let me know what you think. I know, it’s a shameless attempt to lure you all to my website to play a completely pointless game, but it’s an experiment to see what works. The algorithm is my secret for now, and I may tweak it in future. One of my initial thoughts is to develop something akin to Google Pagerank, where each Twitter user is ranked according to the strength / value of those following them. This is a little way off, and may well be a step further into pointlessness, but it might appeal to some.

…Thereby proving my point, don’t you think?

Now, wouldn’t it be great if this could be as effective for popular search terms too?

It is impossible for anyone to guarantee that they can get you to the top of the organic google (or other major engine) search results, and yet many businesses still hand over their hard-earned money to SEO companies who claim just that.

For a start, they claim this without knowing what search phrases are important to your business, so they cannot know how competitive your search terms are going to be. Second, nobody knows how the search engine ranking formulae work, and they change regularly, so how can they guarantee to get you to number 1 (and more’s the point, keep you there)?

Sure, they could suggest that you add the phrase ‘teasing tipplers of the world unite’ to your web page, and then show you how you can search Google for this phrase and see your website at the top. But, how often do you think anybody will search for that phrase? Answer – never! So what’s the point?

So ignore these companies and their claims, and find yourself a reputable SEO company that spends time understanding YOUR requirements first. Better still, if your business can spare you, why not work through the hints and tips in this blog, and perhaps subscribe so that you don’t miss anything new, and do it yourself?

Make sure that your images are appropriately named (e.g. red-widget.gif), and ensure that they have descriptive title attributes and alt attributes to describe what the image is about, and what it looks like.

Search engines will use this information as a better indication of what the page itself is all about, and will quite often index the images themselves so that they appear when people search for images of things, helping to boost your traffic even further.