How to optimize your chinese urls for Baidu (1/2)

How to use Chinese urls, or pinyin url? In this post you will learn SEO tips and discover very useful tools to automatically transliterate your chinese title into pinyin and make your internal urls search engine friendly !

First let's go through some basics and theory.

1- SEO friendly URL
You certainly already heard that urls are taken into consideration by search engines like baidu or google in the page ranking. A page with keywords in it's url would have a better ranking than the same one without keywords. That's why a classic first step of SEO experts consist in enhancing urls of a website.

Let say you are in charge of a wine e-business, a good SEO compliant url for your product would look like :
www.firstwine.com/red-wine/france/bordeaux/fronsac/chateau-richelieu
This way search engines will be able to associate keywords "red wine", france, bordeaux, fronsac, chateau richelieu, to your page.

2- URL Encoding
According to the RFC1738 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt), urls should only use ASCII character-set.
(http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_ascii.asp). It's a bit annoying cause this set is very basic, it contains only 128 characters : alpha-numeric characters and some special char.
But since the ASCII character-set is used to send information between computers on the Internet, urls have to comply this rule too.

To ensure we use the right encoding, webmasters use url encoding functions when they create internet pages and when they display urls.
URL encoding replaces none or unsafe ASCII characters specified in the rfc, with "%" followed by some hexadecimal digits corresponding to the character values in the ISO-8859-1 character-set.

Let see what we get :

"vins français" will be alter to "vins+fran%E7ais"
...not very user or SEO friendly

"葡萄酒" turns to "%26%2333889%3B%26%2333796%3B%26%2337202%3B"
hmm... not user friendly and certainly not SEO friendly

So how to deal with that ?
How to enhance your url for SEO when you are using a non ASCII character set language (like french or chinese for example !)

Well, simply by contacting SEO professionals Them (www.them.pro)... ;o)

...or read the next post, I will explain in details how to automatically transliterate your chinese page title into pinyin and use it for your urls with CMS drupal. so, stay tuned...