Search Engine Optimization, which is abbreviated as SEO, has become a leading Internet marketing tool. These days, if you want to reach a bigger market and earn bigger profits, you need to have a tried and tested strategy to be implemented in your website, which in itself must be designed in such a way as to attract and maintain customers. While SEO can be applied in any business from whichever part of the world, some countries have unique rules to follow which make business more challenging and exciting than usual.
For instance, the services for SEO in China are different from the services for SEO in the United States. For instance, Chinese companies generally charge by the keyword in SEO for the Chinese market. A top-ten listing for a particular “cool word” (a word that has low return results in Google) may cost you 8,000 RMB a word/year. On the other hand, a “hot word” (a word that has high return results) may cost you 20,000 to 30,000 RMB a word/year. It is important to understand and embrace this difference in SEO culture; that is the only way to ride it and make profit from it.
Baidu vs. Google: Content-consciousness is cool in China
Indeed, SEO for the Chinese market is unique. One concrete piece of evidence that China has a different SEO perspective is the fact that Baidu, not Google, dominates the search engines in this country. The primary reason for this, as experts have revealed in various studies, is Baidu’s content-oriented policy. Baidu is no doubt extra sensitive to the information posted in a blog or forum. Adult content, such as pornography, and forbidden words by the Chinese government, are a complete no-no if you want not just one page but the whole of your website to rank high in this search engine.
Of course, it is important to optimize page titles, headings, and keyword density. These factors all affect content description, which Baidu, the leading search engine in China, prioritizes. Do take note, however, that anchor-texts for incoming links, which seem to be an imperative SEO factor for Google, matters very little for Baidu, so do not dwell on these things if your target are Chinese search engines. Also, do not spend so much time duplicating content for SEO for the Chinese market – Baidu does not care much for this, either.
Content translation is also a key factor in the success of a blog for a business based in China. Automatic tools are available these days for translating site content. This can give you better exposure than you think; many bloggers using automatic tools for translation have reported relative success. Some companies even invest on human resources to have their blog or website’s content translated in order to reach the seemingly elusive – yet very loyal – Chinese Chinese audience.
How do you geo tag? It only takes a few steps. First of all, turn on your geotagging feature on your Twitter account under the Settings menu. Geotagging twitter is turned off by default. The next thing to do is to download cell phone applications that can attach geo tags. Twitter alone cannot attach geo tags. You will need third party Twitter applications for this. One good app for this is Tweetdeck, Gowalla or Foursquare.