Baidu SEO Challenges and Intricacies of Marketing in China

SEO practices for Baidu and other Chinese search engines are little known in the Western world. However, in order for a company to promote itself successfully in the Middle Kingdom, it is absolutely necessary to go online in China. Chinese SEO is not only about working on the on-site and off-site aspects of a site, there are also many administrative tasks to take into account: the creation of a site in China can pose governmental problems (obtaining a Chinese mobile line, applying for an ICP license, proving that the company is well established in China, etc.)

In order for readers to understand how SEO and web-marketing works in China, tips, advice and case studies are presented throughout this book.

Véronique Duong, is the author of Baidu SEO: Challenges and Intricacies of Marketing in China, published by Wiley.

Preface ix

Introduction  xiii

Chapter 1. Baidu, Its Services and Its Competitors 1

1.1. The history of Baidu 1

1.2. Very “rich” Search Engine Results Page  2

1.3. Baidu versus HaoSou and Sogou  4

1.4. Baidu’s services  6

1.5. Eye tracking on Baidu versus Google 7

1.6. How does “BaiduSpider” work?  8

1.7. Understanding the difference between crawl and indexing on Baidu 11

Chapter 2. Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO 13

2.1. Purchasing a domain name with a “.cn” extension  13

2.2. Choosing a domain name 13

2.3. Hosting a site in Hong Kong and/or in China 14

2.3.1. Recommended hosting companies 16

2.3.2. Case study  17

2.4. Chinese mobile telephone line  18

2.5. Optimizing an HTML code for Baidu 19

2.6. Is HTTPS protocol incompatible with Baidu? 20

2.7. “Baidu MIP”, a new feature for mobile pages in 2016 22

2.8. Encoding a Chinese site  24

2.9. Baidu’s “Webmaster Tools” 25

2.10. Check that the robots.txt complies with the Baidu guidelines  27

2.11. How should a robots.txt with a high number of restrictions be managed?  28

2.12. Tags and attributes that are not compatible with Baidu 30

2.12.1. The rel=“canonical” attribute does not work on Baidu  30

2.12.2. The hreflang attribute does not work on Baidu  31

2.12.3. Micro data tags (Schema.org) do not work in Baidu  32

2.13. Baidu’s V1, V2 and V3 icons  33

2.14. The “official site” icon on Baidu (?¯ã¤)  35

2.15. The Pomegranate algorithm (�Î?Ö) 37

2.16. The Money Plant algorithm against external spam links 37

2.17. Sitemap for Baidu 39

2.18. Submitting URLs to Baidu automatically 39

2.19. Adapt your mobile site to Baidu  42

2.20. Declaring a mobile site in Webmaster Tools 43

2.21. Baidu’s official good practices for optimizing a mobile site 44

2.22. Why should you have a Responsive Design site?  45

2.23. Managing the redesign of a site for Baidu 47

2.24. Simple and ordinary URLs for Baidu  49

2.25. URL formats for press sites for Baidu news 50

2.26. The negative impact of empty internal results pages 50

2.27. Problems with link analysis and Rapid Positioning  51

Chapter 3. Semantic and Editorial Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO  53

3.1. Baidu Index: a useful platform for studying search trends 53

3.2. Baidu’s keyword generation tool  54

3.3. Keywords and ranking: Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency statistics 55

3.4. The length of the title and meta description meta-tags 56

3.5. The influence of keywords on Baidu SEO  58

3.6. The importance of keyword density 59

3.7. Strategy for keywords and SERP analysis  61

Chapter 4. Subjects Related to Baidu SEO 65

4.1. Baidu Certified Marketing Specialist certifications  65

4.2. Baidu’s browser  66

4.3. Connecting to a social network directly from the SERPs 68

4.4. Chinese e-commerce and Baidu SEO: current trends 69

4.5. AutoNavi is outperforming Baidu Maps  71

4.6. Social networks and Baidu 71

Chapter 5. Methodology of a Baidu SEO Campaign 75

5.1. First step: kick-off meeting 75

5.2. The SEO project reverse schedule  76

5.2.1. How is a Gantt chart created?  77

5.3. The technical audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu 80

5.4. The semantic audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu 81

5.5. Keyword analysis 82

5.6. Optimizing Chinese meta-tags  83

5.7. Optimizing headings tags 85

5.8. Optimizing textual content 86

5.9. Optimizing Chinese URLs 88

5.10. Optimizing text anchors 89

5.11. Optimizing images 91

5.12. Optimizing breadcrumbs 92

5.13. Dragon Metrics: a special position monitoring tool for China 92

5.14. Netlinking: searching for external links  94

Chapter 6. Beyond Baidu SEO  97

6.1. Advice on SMO optimization for WeChat  98

6.2. Advice for social marketing on Weibo 100

6.3. Mei Nu in China: a marketing method  104

6.4. Wang Hong: the new online promotion model  106

Conclusion  111

Glossary  113

Bibliography 121

Index 123

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