SEO tips for Baidu
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China with approximately 63 percent of the overall search engine market in China.
Baidu Search Engine optimization is essential to any B2B company with a chinese website.
Thinking about Search Engine Optimazation Baidu has differents requirements in compare to what it might be used to Google. As a result of a heavy censorship in China, Baidu has different ranking factors and rules that it shouldn’t apply the same SEO rules that it would for Google.
Site structure
Companies’s website should have a understandable and coherent navigation in order to make it easy for user find what they are looking for. This also helps search engines to understand the website’s content quickly and increasing the chance for better rankings.
The website should use a flat and a tree structure. This makes it easy for users and search engines to find content by using only very few cliks. Chinese sites should implement a good linking structure. There should be in each page a link back to the home page.
Using breadcrumbs can shows your visitors where they are and in addition can helps the Baiduspider to crawl the site.
Use the correct language utilising simple chinese characters
Baidu’s most important main selling aspect and attribute is that Baidu only index simple Chinese characters. There are some issues in indexing language because there are often several different dialects within China and dissimilar characters for the same keyword too. To solve these issues Baidu solely indexes simplified Chinese characters.
Choose a suitable domain name
Choose an appropriate domain name is a decisive aspect of any website, regardless of the country or search engine being focused. The Chinese search engine advises to use the shorter possible and memorable domain names. Other recommendation by Baidu is selecting a domain name which can transmit a sense of trust, handling well-know suffixes as .com.cn or .cn.
Subdomain
Baidu has a different way to treat subdomains than Google and Bing. Baidu treats subdomains differently to Google and Bing. Consequently, the chinese search engine consider subdomains like an organized subcategory and because of that root demain’s authority and subdomain’s authority are directly related.
Baidu recommends don’t use too many subdomains and don’t duplicate the same content between two separate subdomains because Baidu will identify this as duplicated.
Crawl technology and restriction
Baidu uses a search engine crawler which it is called “Baidu spider”. This is the same process that Google uses with Goglebot. Its job is stay away from elements and types of web content that cannot be crawled by the Baidu spider. Consequently, Baidu has some types of limitations:
• Javascript, Ajax contents or links are ignored by the chinese search engine.
• Pictures, flash files, text contained in images and non-text contents are not readable by Baidu because it can only read text contents.
Title tags
This is one of the most basic and important onsite elements and should contain the most important keywords. At the same time should be attractive with a clear message and do not stuff keywords or insert non-relevantones in the title tag.
When splitting up the keywords Baidu recommends an underscore (_) as a good separator. This is in direct contrast to Google and Bing which recommend a hyphen (-).
Meta Description Tag
Although the meta description does not have weigh in the ranking, it It is important for the website to create a highly meta description which will match the content of your page.
The meta description should be a detailed description of the website content and not too short.
Make sure you take note of this tips in order to heighten your company’s SEO in China.
Sources:
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SEO Baidu is essential to attract Chinese industrial buyers
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— Olivier VEROT (@Olivierverot) 6 Septembre 2014
— China SEO (@topmarketingweb) 17 Novembre 2014
