Search Engine Marketing in China: An Untapped Goldmine.
The blogosphere has been abuzz for months about Chinese search engine upstart Baidu.com for its market share dominance over Google in the world's fastest growing online audience. Estimates place Baidu's marketshare at 58-71% of total search queries performed in China. With the size of the audience, search engine marketers in the United States have been unusually slow to market to and optimize for this lucrative market. Much of this fact is certainly due to the language barrier, but if you have goods or services to market in China relying on your English site to reach them will get you nowhere. Slowly.
Preparing for Chinese Search Engine Traffic
The first step in expanding your businesses reach is to have your existing website translated by a reputable translation service. There are hundreds of sites available online where you can find reasonably priced translation services. Vendors include Translator's Cafe, wintranslation.com, and Global Bridge. Baidu favors sites physically hosted on mainland China and sites located outside China typically have intermittent connection problems. As a result paying for hosting in China is well worth the investment. Xinnet.com is the countries largest hosting provider and can be used here: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xinnet.com%2F&langpair=zh%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8. There is some debate as to whether or not having a ".cn" domain name helps much but for a $32 registration fee it doesn't really make sense to risk it. (you can buy a .cn domain here: https://www.moniker.com/ )
Optimization Considerations
Just because a translator has done their best to provide you with accurate translation services doesn't mean they have used keywords in your titles, meta tags, or URL's that people in China will actually use to find you. Unfortunately we can't just fire up our trusty tools like wordtracker or keyword discovery to find out search trends on Baidu.com or even Google.cn. The best solutions I have found are Google.cn adwords keyword tool, and Baidu's equivalent of Google Trends available here. (remember you can paste any of these urls into google's inline translation tool) Unless you speak Chinese, you are going to be faced with the arduous task of translating every related keyword until you find something worth while. When you've finished finding Chinese equivalents of your major keywords it's time to go back to the translator again and make sure all of the words you are using are relevant and will likely convert into business. A nati
How does Baidu's algorithm compare to Google's?
The nature of Baidu's rise to dominance can be traced back to the numerous mp3 files that can be found through it's mp3 search portal. The algorithm itself has several flaws that Google has already taken steps to mitigate. The largest areas of difference are:
No PageRank. All links are treated the same making link popularity (and internal links) the single biggest contributor to keyword rankings.
Baidu gives more weight to keywords in URLs than Google. Use your keywords in your URL. e.g. http://keyword.cn/keyword.php
Link popularity trumps relevancy. Don't worry about relevancy on inbound links, the more the merrier.
Meta Tags matter! While Google has devalued meta tags for keyword rankings, Baidu has done no such thing.
Google.cn or Baidu.com?
While on paper Baidu has the lion's share of the search engine market in China, much of this is due to the mp3 search portal. Baidu users are typically less educated and less affluent. As a result, Web-Op recommends sticking to traditional, "Google Approved" optimization practices.
If you are interested in learning more about Web-Op's Chinese-friendly optimization services, please contact us here.
