Baidu SEO: Challenges and Intricacies of Marketing in China

By Véronique Duong

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jun 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781119368748

Book preview

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

1 Baidu, Its Services and Its Competitors

1.1. The history of Baidu

1.2. Very rich Search Engine Results Page

1.3. Baidu versus HaoSou and Sogou

1.4. Baidu’s services

1.5. Eye tracking on Baidu versus Google

1.6. How does BaiduSpider work?

1.7. Understanding the difference between crawl and indexing on Baidu

2 Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

2.1. Purchasing a domain name with a .cn extension

2.2. Choosing a domain name

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

2.4. Chinese mobile telephone line

2.5. Optimizing an HTML code for Baidu

2.6. Is HTTPS protocol incompatible with Baidu?

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

2.8. Encoding a Chinese site

2.9. Baidu’s Webmaster Tools

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

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

2.12. Tags and attributes that are not compatible with Baidu

2.13. Baidu’s V1, V2 and V3 icons

2.14. The official site icon on Baidu part1_Inline_49_12.gif

2.15. The Pomegranate algorithm part1_Inline_51_8.gif

2.16. The Money Plant algorithm against external spam links

2.17. Sitemap for Baidu

2.18. Submitting URLs to Baidu automatically

2.19. Adapt your mobile site to Baidu

2.20. Declaring a mobile site in Webmaster Tools

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

2.22. Why should you have a Responsive Design site?

2.23. Managing the redesign of a site for Baidu

2.24. Simple and ordinary URLs for Baidu

2.25. URL formats for press sites for Baidu news

2.26. The negative impact of empty internal results pages

2.27. Problems with link analysis and Rapid Positioning

3 Semantic and Editorial Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

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

3.2. Baidu’s keyword generation tool

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

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

3.5. The influence of keywords on Baidu SEO

3.6. The importance of keyword density

3.7. Strategy for keywords and SERP analysis

4 Subjects Related to Baidu SEO

4.1. Baidu Certified Marketing Specialist certifications

4.2. Baidu’s browser

4.3. Connecting to a social network directly from the SERPs

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

4.5. AutoNavi is outperforming Baidu Maps

4.6. Social networks and Baidu

5 Methodology of a Baidu SEO Campaign

5.1. First step: kick-off meeting

5.2. The SEO project reverse schedule

5.3. The technical audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu

5.4. The semantic audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu

5.5. Keyword analysis

5.6. Optimizing Chinese meta-tags

5.7. Optimizing headings tags

5.8. Optimizing textual content

5.9. Optimizing Chinese URLs

5.10. Optimizing text anchors

5.11. Optimizing images

5.12. Optimizing breadcrumbs

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

5.14. Netlinking: searching for external links

6 Beyond Baidu SEO

6.1. Advice on SMO optimization for WeChat

6.2. Advice for social marketing on Weibo

6.3. Mei Nu in China: a marketing method

6.4. Wang Hong part2_Inline_42_15.gif the new online promotion model

Conclusion

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

2 Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

Table 2.1. ICP license notice

Table 2.2. Reject message

Table 2.3. Example of a head in HTML5. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.4. Baidu MIP, main tags to be used

Table 2.5. Examples of tags excluded from Baidu MIP

Table 2.6. Baidu Pomegranate (source: Dragon Metrics)

Table 2.7. Baidu Money Plant (source: Dragon Metrics)

Table 2.8. Method using Curl. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.9. Method using HTTP Post. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.10. Method using PHP. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.11. Method using Ruby. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.12. Method using Python. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 2.13. Steps to take during a redesign (source: http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/college/articleinfo?id=841)

3 Semantic and Editorial Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

Table 3.1. Example of a title with repetition of the keyword perfume. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 3.2. Example of a meta description with the keyword perfume. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Table 3.3. Source site Brand Lady 8844, product text Givenchy. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

5 Methodology of a Baidu SEO Campaign

Table 5.1. Example of title

Table 5.2. Example of a meta description. For a color version of this table, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

List of Illustrations

1 Baidu, Its Services and Its Competitors

Figure 1.1. Baidu logo written in Chinese characters and pinyin

Figure 1.2. Comparative eye tracking of Chinese Internet users (source: Autoveille). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 1.3. BaiduSpider, sorting and hierarchization of data. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

2 Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

Figure 2.1. Home page of the Chinese site of the brand Omega. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 2.2. Zhangzhang Baidu (Baidu Webmaster Tools). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 2.3. Example of a Vcard notice (source: Autoveille). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

3 Semantic and Editorial Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO

Figure 3.1. Home page of the site of Brand Lady 8844 (image taken in December 2016). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 3.2. Home page of Bag86.com (taken in December 2016). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

4 Subjects Related to Baidu SEO

Figure 4.1. Home page of Baidu's browser (image taken in December 2016). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 4.2. AutoNavi home page (image taken in December 2016). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 4.3. Renren home page (image taken in December 2016). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

5 Methodology of a Baidu SEO Campaign

Figure 5.1. Representation of a milestone on a Gantt chart. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

6 Beyond Baidu SEO

Figure 6.1. Weibo home page. For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 6.2. Fan Bing Bing (source: Nautiljon). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 6.3. Zhang Dayi (source: www.china.org.cn). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

Figure 6.4. Papi Jiang (source: www.technode.com). For a color version of this figure, see www.iste.co.uk/duong/SEO.zip

FOCUS SERIES

Baidu SEO

Challenges and Intricacies of Marketing in China

Véronique Duong

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First published 2017 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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The rights of Véronique Duong to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935105

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