China SEO Blog

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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We have just added an “English-Chinese SEO and Internet Marketing Dictionary” to our SEO Tools & Resources page. You will find in this SEO glossary all the major SEO terms and their translation in Chinese (mandarin). The “pinyin” version of the Chinese translation is also displayed.

This new resource will definitely help bilingual search marketers in China. More terms will be added soon so make sure to bookmark the page for the final version.

Click here to go to the new page.

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We are pleased to announce our new “Chinese Landing Page Package“, which objective is to enable any site owner worldwide to add a single entry page in Chinese language.

Over a seven-day period, our SEO consultants will work on your site, and provide a summary in Chinese about your company and its products or services. The new page will then be properly optimized for keywords relevant to your industry and popular with Chinese users.

This package will help you to reach Chinese visitors and can serve for testing before a potential entry in the Chinese market.

The promotional cost of our Chinese Landing Page Package is USD99.

For more details, please visit our special offers page or click here to download.

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It appears that Google has finally let go of the supplemental results label. For the last three years, “Google Hell” as many like to call it has tortured webmasters and search marketers alike by labeling content as second class, but it has also nurtured the creation of tutorials and tricks to get web pages out of it.

A very important point is that up to now, although the supplemental results label doesn’t appear along your Google search, it doesn’t mean that Google Supplemental Index is dead. Only the label will be missing. You will still have pages in the supplemental index, and a little trick that we have discovered for displaying which one of your pages are in the supplemental index, is to type site:yoursite.com/& in the Google Search box.

You might use this syntax while it works. From reports we have read recently Google has been working towards reducing the gap between the supplemental index and its main index. So the suppression of the supplemental result label may be one step toward its abolition or the integration of the supplemental results into the main index.

Patrick Abotsi
www.seo4china.com

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So you are about to launch a new site targeting Chinese customers, or add a Chinese version to your current site for the Middle Kingdom, and don’t know where to start your seo strategy. Far from being a complete reference, this article gives you eight quick tips that will get you started on the long march to your internet success in China and top position in the country’s current leading search Engine, Baidu.

Bear in mind that as far as the fundamentals are concerned, search engine in China is not an alien specie. Yes keyword-rich content, link popularity, title and meta-tag keyword optimization, keyword in your domain name and other SEO tricks and methods can also be applied to Baidu, although the importance of each may differ substantially when compared to Google or other major global search engines.

1-Get a China Top-Level Domain (.cn, .com.cn, .net.cn etc.). If possible, you should also get the Chinese-character top level domain corresponding to your main keyword.

2-Use your keyword in your url. Baidu seems to give even more importance than Google to keyword presence in your web address.

3-Host your site in China. You should consider having your new website or your new sub-domain hosted in China and get registered (ICP). This will also ensure not having your site banned down the road (in case your current hosting company overseas also host sites detrimental to China resulting in its IP being blocked and becoming inaccessible from China).

4-Get your site translated in Chinese by professionals. Very few searches are conducted in English on Baidu, and English pages or sites rank usually very low compared to sites in Chinese. On the other hand, you are trying to reach an audience that basically would be using only Chinese for searches, even for the highly educated segment. Make sure to have your site translated BY HUMANS and make sure to double check it by a third-party.

5-Optimize your meta-tags. In Chinese. Due to abuse of the system the importance of meta-tags has been devalued by all the major international search engines. For Baidu it is still VERY relevant. Do not overlook it.

6-Maximize the use of your inbound links anchor text. While Google discount internal links and gives more weight to external links with the keywords in the anchor text, for Baidu the internal links carry a lot of weight.

7-Get as many links as possible. Google emphasizes quality over quantity when it comes to the links importance for a website ranking, but Baidu has less requirements on the link source authority. So even lower quality links can help your rankings.

8-Submit your site to Baidu. Use http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html to do it.

Hope these quick eight tips will help you start your Baidu optimization. We will be writing very soon on more specific aspects on search engine optimization in China and giving Baidu-specific SEO tips.

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