Make sure your site is accessible in China before paying Google for traffic

Posted on July 16th, 2008 in China SEO Tip, Pay-Per-Click, Web Hosting by Patrick Abotsi

One of the tings mostly overlooked by advertisers, especially those not based in China and trying to promote their websites in China through pay per click (Google Adwords) is the fact that the Chinese visitors actually might just not be able to visit their websites!

One example should help. Everyone knows about Homestead.com , the popular all-in-one DIY sitebuilder + hosting platform that was quite hot in the early 2000, maybe not that much now as people become more knowledgeable in web design or for selecting a web hosting solution that better suits their needs. Homestead advertise heavily through Adwords and China is one of the markets where their ads are shown. They appear mostly for their own name and many search terms related to web hosting, wed design etc. However, Homestead.com has been blocked in China for the last two or three years at least! This means that they have been spending tens of dollars (or even more, considering that their industry has rather high CPC values) every day for years now, while those who click on the ad could not access their sites and would shut down the browser in a second. Talking about wasting resources.

Now for Homestead these might be pennies and probably they don’t care of this loss for China in their global advertising budget. However for small businesses targeting China, without the proper analytics software in place to track country of origin for their web visitors, bounce rates etc. that could have made them aware of the problem, this could be a serious hit to their bottom lines. We had a Canadian client coming to us who, after six months of “heavy” advertising in China through Adwords for their Chinese website, didn’t seem to get anything going in terms of sales or leads, and where surprised to find out that their sites couldn’t be accessed here without a proxy! And don’t count on Google to inform you of the situation, you might even be paying more than other advertisers since the high bounce rate will definitely lower your site quality score.

So, if you were to advertise through Google Adwords (or any other PPC network, for what it matters) in China, first make sure that you site can be seen here. There are online tools to check access from Chinese locations, if you know someone in China the best bet would be to ask them to test if they can visit your site. Ultimately, if your site main audience in China, you might consider hosting in China altogether, as you will get faster load times for your visitors which can be a boost for your site friendliness for users and quality score as well…But this will be for another article :)

China English-language Directories Top 5

Posted on November 30th, 2007 in China SEO Tip by Patrick Abotsi

Got a website about China in English? You can submit it to the following list of directories to get it started. We have tried to select the best 5 English directories in China while avoiding business-only ones as well as those which, although well-established, do not appear to accept or approve new submissions. Let’s get started.

1) China Window-PR4
Alexa Rank: 430,313
Reciprocal Links: Free (conditions apply)
Regular Links: $29/Year
Featured Links: $99/Year
URL: www.china-window.com/china-directory

2) Business-China.com-PR4
Alexa Rank: 486,094
Reciprocal Links: N/A
Regular Links: Free
Featured Links: RMB960 or 1,180/Year
URL: www.business-china.com

3) China Findouter-PR5
Alexa Rank: 137,875
Reciprocal Links: Free (fast approval)
Regular Links: Free
Featured Links: N/A
URL: www.findouter.com/China

4) China Directory-PR4
Alexa Rank: 1,093,984
Reciprocal Links: Free
Regular Links: Free
Featured Links: $30/month, cheaper for multiple months
URL: www.chinadirectory.com

5) China Expats Directory-PR2
Alexa Rank: 815,606
Reciprocal Links: Free
Regular Links: Free
Featured Links: $4.95/Year
URL: www.expatchina.net
Disclaimer: This site is owned by our parent company, Newbridge Technologies Limited, Hong Kong.

Please note that the Alexa and PR values are valid at the date we publish this article, November 30th, 2007

We may have missed some better directories, if you do know of anyone feel free to post a link with your reply.

Source: www.seo4china.com

Using sub-domains to take advantage of the new Google Geographic Targeting Tool in China

Posted on November 12th, 2007 in China SEO Tip, Google, SEO by Patrick Abotsi

Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Google Sitemaps) has seen recently the introduction of “Geograhic Targeting” in the tools it offers to webmasters. Essentially, it allows webmasters to inform Google of which country they target, by selecting this country in their account. Country domain specific TLDs (such as .cn, .ca, .co.uk etc.) will be automatically set to the countries they refer to.

The problem is, in today’s global economy, many companies have a huge portion of their clients (and web visitors) from countries other than the ones they are based in. So, how can a webmaster or a company in China capitalize on this new tool (that has the potential to help improve the ranking in the targeted country) without sacrificing current rankings achieved on the main Google searches and other countries?

One solution would be the use of sub-domains. Here is the example of our web hosting division website www.sinohosting.net ; currently in Google Webmaster Tools the site is not set to any specific geographic target. Nevertheless, we have set the Chinese version of the site, which is on its own sub-domain cn.sinohosting.net and is added as a separate website on Google Webmaster Tools, with its own sitemap and stats etc., to China. That way, the Chinese site would hopefully be able to achieve better rankings for searches in China (in Chinese though) without compromising the overall rankings of the main site for searches conducted in English globally.

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