Reaching more than 1.1 billion devices in China is not a straightforward task. If you want to be found online – you’ll need to adapt, as the battle for Chinese clicks intensifies.
Keeping one eye on the Chinese digital landscape, let’s dive deep into optimization tips for Baidu that your business can adopt.
Offsite strategy for Baidu
It is critical to aggressively market your website online, on appropriate sites, in order to generate traffic to your website. The same holds true for your Chinese website. Off-site SEO can help your Baidu rankings in a variety of ways, including the following:
• Baidu will rank you based on your news posts. You must submit your news posts to Baidu News Protocol to take full advantage of this. This will encourage more people to visit your website
• Promote your brand on as many Chinese websites as possible- by adding relevant articles, videos, and photographs
• It’s critical to utilize simple Chinese characters as anchor text back to your site, in any off-site marketing you undertake. The ideal case scenario is to write your entire message in Chinese characters, as this will attract the spiders the most.
• There’s some evidence that uploading your site’s pages to Baidu Bookmarks, speeds up the indexing process. Submitting a sitemap to Baidu, like you do for Google, allows them to find all of the pages on your site. Here is Baidu’s sitemap submission portal.
Working With Your On-Page SEO
In contrast to Google’s current trend, Baidu places a high value on metadata. This data comprises meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags, H1 and H2 tags, and alternative tags.
All of this data is really crucial to Baidu’s crawlers, so having it – and making sure it’s translated into basic Chinese – will significantly improve your site’s ranks. Also, keep the following in mind when it comes to your keywords and site text:
• Keyword density is important. For a solid performance, keep it between 6 and 10%.
• Internal links should have anchor words. These would be clickable text that connects one of your pages to another. It has a minor impact on your rankings.
• Navigation must be simple. Make sure your site has a clear hierarchy and is easy to explore.
• Avoid Flash or JavaScript. Baidu’s spiders do not yet recognize Flash or JavaScript, so stick to plain HTML.
• Reduce the size of Frame and iFrame. There is compelling evidence that Baidu’s crawlers may ignore iFrame content.
• Keep the most important information at the top of the page. Baidu’s spiders, due to their low connectivity, are renowned for just crawling the first 100k to 120 kilobytes of your content. As a result, keeping the most critical information at the top of each page is a good idea.
• Refresh regularly: Baidu, like other search engines, prefers content that is frequently updated. As a result, ensure sure your content is updated on a frequent basis.
The majority of SEO efforts on your site should be made in these areas. Choose your keywords, select sites to optimise for those keywords, and then implement the recommendations above. Also, these are 2 cornerstones of your Chinese search strategy as far as Baidu is considered. We will get into link acquisition & content, the remaining 2 cornerstones, in our next blog.
