While European and American economies are still struggling to control their financial crisis, China managed last year to achieve almost a 2-digit growth rate. Taking into account the fact that the Per Capita income continues to increase, China, a country with over 1 million millionaires and a total population of over 1.3 billion people, is one of the most important immerging markets in the word.

What steps did your business take to invest on this market or to attract more Chinese customers? Have you at least made sure that your website is visible to Chinese Internet users? Have you optimized your site for the Chinese search engines? In this article we will discuss about Baidu which is one of the most important Chinese web services and we will share 10 useful SEO Tips that will enable you to improve your rankings.

Baidu: More than a local search engine

It is safe to say that with over 513 million internet users in 2011, Baidu, one of the most popular sites in China, is so much more than a local search engine. Despite Chinese government’s strict censorship, Baidu is a giant with potential growth especially now that the relationships between Google and Chinese Government are not at its best.



So based on the above Baidu can become an important source of traffic for your website. Have you considered getting indexed and ranked in Baidu’ search engine results yet? Now is the time, and we are happy to share with you some tips for an optimized kick start.

1. Content must be in mandarin

Baidu is a local search engine that favors websites that contain content in simplified Chinese. An obvious local SEO tip is that it is better to use the language of the users that you want to attract! This will help both your visitors and your SEO.

2. Baidu actively censors web content

If you want your website to be able to rank on Baidu, make sure that your content does not include any explicit words or attacks to Chinese government. The censorship is so strict that you should also avoid linking directly to websites or blogs that contain such content.

3. Backlinks: Quantity matters

Increasing the quantity of backlinks is one of the most important and basic practices for Baidu optimization. It seems that Link Quantity is at least as important as Quality. Nevertheless always keep in mind that your website must also be linked by high quality web pages.

4. Internal Anchor Texts

Just like it happens with every modern search engine the anchor text of the backlinks plays a significant role. Linking to your web pages with targeted keywords, always in simplified Chinese, will provide important information to Baidu crawling system and it will help you improve your rankings. Use the Backlink Analysis and Link Popularity tools to analyze the Link Building campaign of your website and the ones of your competitors in order to determine whether they focus on particular keywords.

5. Original unique content

This is a global fact. Uniqueness is always appreciated, especially when it comes to search engine result pages of Baidu. Use our Duplicate Content or WSA Spider tools to find and eliminate duplicate content on your website.

6. Have a dedicated website for China

Baidu is the first Search Engine in this huge market; therefore, any solid search marketing campaign has the obligation of considering Baidu as a major search engine that requires special treatment even if this means building a totally new dedicated website.

7. Baidu Phoenix Nest PPC

Organic search results and paid are sometimes blended. It is highly recommended that you opt-in Baidu paid search network as it returns positive traffic and organic rankings as well.

8.Link Building

Link building is a difficult but also a creative, ongoing task that must be done carefully. Baidu takes into consideration incoming links coming from Chinese hosted websites with established authority. The Backlink Hunter tool can help you find and acquire thousands of backlinks so make sure you use it.

9. On Page Optimization

Similar to Google, Baidu takes into account Title tags. Moreover, Baidu weights also meta description, keywords heading and alt tags. Don’t forget to use simplified Chinese and not Pin Yin拼音. Use the Keyword Analyzer and Web SEO Analysis tools to ensure that your website’s content is well optimized.

10. Hosting & Domain

Rule of thumb on Chinese SEO is the local hosting. While trying to optimize a website for Baidu, forget subdomains or folders and Geo-location from Google Webmaster tools. The domain must be hosted in China on local top level domain .cn or .com.cn

Here are some useful tools that can help you optimize your website in Baidu:

Web SEO Analytics Toolbox

Baidu Index – Keyword Insights tool

Webmaster Tools

URL Submitter

Baidu Open Platform

Try out the above tips and let us know how you did!