Optimize your website on Baidu is not an easy task
In China the most important search engine is Baidu. The local “Google” dominates China the search market with half a billion Chinese who use the search engine regularly.
If you are a company willing to start or develop your business in China, one of the most effective ways is to apply different strategies on Baidu. But even if you are used to how search engines work in your country, you maybe want to follow our tips because, well to put it in a simple way, Baidu is not Google, and optimizing your website is a different task.
The following 15 tips are the ones you want to know if you want to succeed in optimizing your website and increase your search engine results page SERP on Baidu. We have divided our tips into 3 categories: China and its rules; Content of your website; Technical.
China and its rules
- Domain name : Due to the local strategies set up to prefer Chinese websites than foreign ones, Baidu prefers domain that use a “.cn” top level domain. Even if “.com” and “.net” sites ranked on Baidu, the search engine favor “.cn” domain and these websites always rank higher on SERP.
- Hosting: Baidu cares about where your website is hosted. If it is in China, it will list in higher position your website on a search page.
- Physical address: Baidu also favors websites that have a physical address in China. It does not necessarily mean that you need an office in China, but at least Baidu wants to make sure that you have a local Chinese contact details on your site.
- Censorship: It is crucial that at no occasion you criticize the government, you have to understand that this is a really important matte that Chinese government take really seriously. Due to the strict censorship, if the local institution sees a site that does not meet their criteria, Baidu will simply refuse the listing of your website in its database.
- ICP License: In order to have your website in China, you have to first get an authorization from the Internet Content Publishing (ICP). It takes generally a month to get a license.
Content of your website
- Language: Your website should offer content in simplified Chinese, Baidu will not rank high in its database other foreign languages sites or even Chinese dialect.
- Meta-Tags: According to Baidu’s ranking algorithm, the search engine pays close attention to the meta-tags that your website uses. Those meta-tags include:
- Title Tags: It has to include your keywords; Baidu encourages putting the brand of your company or important keywords on top of every page of your website.
- Meta-Descriptions: Baidu ranks sites with relevant meta-descriptions higher than those which don’t use this method.
- Alt-Tags: Baidu prefers you to use an image that has a relevant alt-tag to the post or page it is published on.
- H-Tags: Baidu treats h-tags similarly to other search engines; every page should have 3 tags (H1 tag, H2 tag, H3 tag). Make sure your keywords are repeated in your H-Tags.
- New and Unique content: Baidu favors new over old contents and prefers you to use unique content. You have to pay attention about your posts on your website, make sure there are new publications regularly and with a content that hasn’t been used anywhere else.
- Keywords to the top: We recommend you placing your keywords near the top of the page, your website will get a higher rank result.
- Quality contents: You should provide quality content on your site. It will help you to appear among the first pages of the search engine, but it would also give you more credibility and help developing your brand image.
- Quantity: Baidu pays close attention to the quantity of information that you provide, it does not mean that you have to offer quantity over quality. Both quantity and quality content must be provided.
The technical part of the SEO
- The load time speed: Speed is a ranking criteria for most of search engines, but it is especially important for Baidu. You should make sure that the load time of your website remains low. Have a local host server and strip the site or irrelevant information, images as much as possible to keep everything smooth.
- Multiple Domains: You should not propose multiple domains and sub-domains on your website. Your Chinese website should only offer a “.cn” site. Stick to a single Chinese site.
- Flash: Baidu does not crawl and cannot index Flash elements in its database. Avoid Flash data for you Chinese site version.
- Baidu Webmaster Tools: Baidu offers its own webmaster tools package. It allows you to gather information and statistics. However it is only available in Chinese language.
Baidu is a very different search engine compared to Google, but if you want to succeed in China, optimization on Baidu is one of the most important steps. Getting through the Chinese giant search engine can be tricky, but with some practice and having a team of professionals like us, you could get the keys to success.
Should you have any requests, do not hesitate to contact our expert team.
We are a SEO agency specialized on Baidu.
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1 comment
Katia_aaa
Hi team, I started using SEO on Google and then on Baidu a few weeks ago and I can’t stop learning from it, I never thought it was so diverse and complicated… there are so many details to think about!! If your article is still accurate, I might use it to perform better while doing SEO for my brand, thanks!