How to Do SEO for Baidu: The Key Steps for Success

Understanding the Importance of Baidu in China

Baidu, often dubbed as China’s Google, dominates the search landscape in the country, making it an essential platform for businesses targeting the vast Chinese market. If you’re accustomed to optimizing for Google, you’ll find Baidu’s SEO landscape quite different. Let’s dive into the nuances of achieving SEO success on Baidu.

Laying the Foundations for Chinese SEO

As China’s economy surges forward, global enterprises are vying for the attention of the digitally-savvy Chinese populace, especially the millennial generation. These individuals are deeply entrenched in the digital world, regularly shopping online and demanding top-quality products. Hence, many international brands have shifted towards establishing online platforms targeting these consumers.

A digital presence, primarily via a website, serves as the cornerstone of brand reputation in today’s digital-first world. It’s essential to understand that while a website is your virtual storefront, the majority of actual sales may happen elsewhere.

But, you might wonder, why is a website crucial? It boils down to online credibility. Absence of a website translates to an absence in SEO endeavors. And without SEO, your brand’s visibility in the vast Chinese digital space diminishes. This invisibility can lead to potential distrust among consumers. Especially for B2B ventures, a website often becomes the primary source of lead acquisition.

A Glimpse into Baidu’s Dominance

Holding the fifth position globally, Baidu’s nearly 70% penetration in the Chinese market cannot be ignored. With Google’s minimal footprint in China, Baidu emerges as the go-to platform for businesses aiming for visibility among the Chinese populace.

One of Baidu’s strengths is its proficiency in understanding and processing the Chinese language. With the largest index of Chinese web pages, Baidu exclusively targets the Chinese audience, providing search results primarily in Simplified Chinese. If you’re aiming to grow your digital footprint in China, Baidu should be your primary focus.

Significance of Content in Baidu SEO

At the heart of Baidu’s search algorithm lies the importance of Metadata. Properly structured titles, infused with the right keywords, can achieve higher rankings, even if the content might sometimes be off-mark.

Furthermore, Metadata – including <meta description> and <meta keyword> – significantly boosts the page’s potential for better visibility. Optimizing these tags with prevalent keywords from Baidu and its competitors can notably amplify your website’s search prominence.

HTML Coding Best Practices

Avoid the usage of ISO-8885-1. Instead, prefer UTF-8 or GB2312, with UTF-8 being the more universal and recommended choice.

Enhancing On-page SEO

Baidu, unlike its Western counterpart Google, lays considerable emphasis on metadata elements like:

• Meta descriptions
• Meta keywords
• Title tags
• H1 and H2 tags
• Alt tags

Such elements are instrumental for Baidu’s crawling mechanisms. Ensuring these are in simplified Chinese and meticulously crafted enhances your ranking prospects. Additionally, follow these guidelines for optimal results:

• Maintain a keyword density between 6 to 10%.
• Optimize anchor texts for internal links.
• Ensure user-friendly site navigation.
• Avoid Flash, JavaScript, Frame, and iFrame. Instead, rely on plain HTML.
• Position essential content at the top to account for Baidu’s limited crawl depth.
• Regularly update content to stay relevant and fresh.

Concentrating your SEO efforts in these areas and adopting the aforementioned best practices will prove fruitful.

Homepage Significance for Baidu SEO

For optimal Baidu SEO, your website’s homepage should predominantly be in Chinese, reflecting the platform’s priority towards native websites. A well-structured homepage linked with crucial landing pages can significantly bolster their visibility. Adopting a link-rich header and footer, as commonly observed in Chinese websites, is recommended.

Harnessing Baidu Webmaster Tools

Baidu Webmaster Tools provides comprehensive insights similar to Google’s Search Console. It’s an indispensable resource to track your website’s performance on Baidu and offers actionable data to enhance your online reach. With this tool, amplify your mobile SEO strategies and tap into a plethora of performance metrics tailored for the Chinese audience.

The Imperative of Mobile Optimization

China’s digital landscape is predominantly mobile-driven. Hence, optimizing for mobile is paramount, especially considering Baidu’s significant emphasis on mobile-friendly sites. Unlike Google, Baidu uses a distinct application for mobile searches, m.baidu.com. Although Baidu strives to enhance loading times for non-optimized sites, it’s often at the expense of user experience. Prioritize mobile optimization during your website’s developmental phase to ensure a seamless user journey.

Submitting Your Website to Baidu

Getting your website indexed on Baidu necessitates submitting it, especially if it’s currently invisible on Baidu searches. Without this step, Baidu’s crawlers might overlook your website. For site submission, leverage Baidu’s open-source platform and also consider submitting a sitemap through http://sitemap.baidu.com.

Monitoring Keyword Performance on Baidu

To ascertain high-performing keywords on Baidu, explore tools like:

• The Baidu Index
• Baidu Live keyword feed
• For those using Baidu’s Phoenix Nest PPC, its new Keyword Research tool can be beneficial, although it’s still evolving.

One of its standout features is the ability to configure geo-targeted keywords, offering more precise targeting.

Obvious but… Respect China’s Internet Regulations

Baidu follows the rules of the Chinese government when it comes to censorship. It will therefore give extra points to “safe” websites, that do not create scandals. A penalty will be placed on pages that are contrary to the censorship laws.

Do not criticize the Chinese government or claim that Taiwan is independent, to avoid being penalized. It is also good for your Baidu SEO to moderate comments. Every day on Youku or Renren moderators have to pay attention to hundreds of comments and delete what is a potential threat.

Offsite strategy for Baidu

• News Posts: Baidu will rank you for your news posts. To fully utilize this, you must submit your news posts to Baidu News Protocol. This will help more visitors flock to your site.
• Promote your brand: this includes posting relevant content, videos, and images on as many Chinese websites as possible.
• Chinese anchors: with any of the off-site marketing you do, it is important to use simple Chinese characters as anchor text back to your site. The best scenario would be to use all Chinese characters for your entire post, as that will attract the spiders even more.
• Baidu Social Bookmarking Tools: there’s some evidence that submitting pages of your site to Baidu Bookmarks help to get pages indexed quicker.

Baidu SEO, Links Acquisition:

• Baidu will put websites that have many backlinks on top of their recommendations
• Baidu will also like certified and official links: newspapers, government websites
• The URL doesn’t have much importance and most of the websites don’t have an optimized URL.
• According to our tests, the “like” button does not affect a website’s rank

Inbound links (links to your site)

The number of other sites linking to your site is an important ranking factor for Baidu, much like Google. However, there are some differences. Here are some key areas to keep in mind:

• The quality of links is not so important. Gaining quality links (measured by how reputable and authoritative a site is) doesn’t seem to play a big role in your ranking on Baidu.
• Quantity matters. At the time of writing, a link from a reputable site seems to carry as much weight as a link from a less reputable site.
• Chinese links matter. Gaining links from other well-ranking, reputable, and relevant Chinese sites is more important than getting links from English sites.

Outbound links

As far as linking from your site to other sites, Baidu considers the number of quality outbound links you have on your site as a factor. The weighting of this factor is however hard to quantify. Our advice would be to link to other sites where ever it is going to be useful to the reader.

Baidu Paid to Advertise

Baidu has a PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, platform much like Google’s Ad Words, named Baidu Phoenix Nest.

The main difference between Phoenix and Ad Words is that Baidu’s platform ranks websites higher depending on their spending level, whereas with Ad Words the relevancy of the content of your site compared to the search phrase increases your CPC (Cost-Per-Click), and betters your position in the PPC rankings.

Does it mean Baidu SEO is useless?

We would not say that. Although Baidu PPC is useful to kick start your project and get traffic at the beginning, in the long term, an SEO strategy is more beneficial. Indeed, organic traffic is more qualitative than Paid traffic and less susceptible to not getting any views the day your competitors decide to bid more than you on your keywords.

Organic results may not be displayed in front of paid ads, but they still generate a nonnegligible amount of quality traffic.

Baidu Ziyuan Webmaster Tools

Baidu, being the dominant search engine in China, offers a suite of tools tailored to aid webmasters in optimizing and monitoring their sites for the platform. This suite is known as Baidu Ziyuan Webmaster Tools. Comparable to Google’s Search Console, Baidu’s webmaster tools provide an array of functionalities that are crucial for anyone looking to establish or improve their online presence in the Chinese market.

Overview of Baidu Ziyuan

Baidu Ziyuan Webmaster Tools is a comprehensive platform that offers insights into website performance, indexing status, and search traffic. By integrating your website with Ziyuan, you can gain a deeper understanding of how Baidu views your site and where improvements can be made.

Site Verification

To start utilizing the platform, you first need to verify your website. This ensures that you are the rightful owner and have the necessary permissions to access detailed analytics. Verification is typically done by adding a meta tag to your site or uploading a specific file.

Sitemap Submission

Submitting a sitemap is crucial for helping Baidu’s spiders crawl and index your website efficiently. Baidu Ziyuan provides a dedicated section where you can upload your sitemap, ensuring that new and updated content gets indexed promptly.

Monitoring Performance

With Baidu Ziyuan, you can monitor essential metrics such as click-through rates, impressions, and the average position of your site in search results. This data is instrumental in gauging your SEO efforts and making necessary adjustments.

Getting Support and Community Insights

One of the significant advantages of Baidu Ziyuan Webmaster Tools is the robust community and support resources. Whether you’re facing technical challenges or need guidance on best practices, the platform offers forums and documentation to assist you in your SEO journey.

In conclusion, Baidu Ziyuan Webmaster Tools is an invaluable resource for anyone serious about Baidu SEO. From monitoring your website’s performance to understanding Baidu’s indexing process, it offers all the tools and insights you’ll need to succeed in the Chinese digital landscape.