seo tips

How to rank on baidu. First, baidu is the largest Chinese search engine, with more than 60% market share, google has about 20%. So, that’s why you should rank on baidu if you want to be in the Chinese market. Actually working on your chinese seo is often working your baidu seo.

For a start, you can check your baidu rank here.

SEO Tips for Baidu Search Engine :
•    Don’t talk about s(e)x or you’ll be out
•    Don’t attack the Chinese government
•    Use Chinese in your website (but don’t mix several languages on the same page – that's a general statement, not only for chinese)
•    Use a .cn / .org.cn / or .com.cn domain name. Baidu loves China and shows it in its search engine response pages rankings.
•    Host your website in china.  Baidu prefers Chinese IP’s.
•    Have a lot of links. Baidu prefers quantity to quality. Don’t try to have a pagerank 6 or above links like you would do for google. Just have thousands of backlinks.
•    Refresh often. This advice applies to google too. But it seems baidu loves fresh content even more.
•    Don’t use ISO-8885-1 coding in your pages but UTF-8 or GB2312 (well, UTF-8 is better because it suits any language around the globe)

By the way, did you know that you can buy rankings in baidu! Yes, you can pay to be part of the search engine organic reponses (well, not so organic obviously).

How to know if it's Naturel or Paid Result in Baidu?

Actually, you can see if websites that are ranking higher than you are paying for it (which explains that you’ve been working for a year without beating them  ;o)
In the baidu search engine response pages, just check if it’s written “tuiguan” (which means they paid), or “baidu kuaizhao” (which means it’s a real naturel organic result).

Even if you don’t read Chinese, remember that it’s just 2 Chinese characters for ads and 4 chinese characters for naturel reponse. Now, you can start your baidu seo job ;o)
 

(you can find the first post on how to optimize your chinese urls for baidu here)

In this post you will learn seo tips for generating seo friendly urls, especially in the case of chinese content : url rewriting, url aliasing and transliteration for chinese title. Then we will put in practice this tips with drupal.

1- Url rewriting

First of all, i hope you all already activated url rewriting for your website, it is a very basic thing when you begin to think about your search engine optimization.
 

What does it mean ?
Except if you create all your web pages manually, when you use a framework or a CMS to generate your pages, urls would usually look like:

htpp://www.example.com?q=node/1.
Your aim is to clean all the mess in that kind of urls and make it more search engine friendly.
 

There are two places where you can apply the rewriting :

1. let the web server manage it : for example in apache in your .htaccess file
2. manage it in your code, by using aliases for your pages

This 2 ways can be combined, for example in drupal, the "?q=" will be removed by apache and the aliases are handled by the drupal php code.
and so
htpp://www.example.com?q=node/1
become as by magic :
http://www.example.com/my-article-title

2- Url aliasing

Of course you can create and manage your aliases manually, but for a large website the best thing to do is to automate this action.
For example you can build a system that take your page titles and creates an alias with it.
A good idea cause most of the time, important keywords will be already in the title of your page, so that will improve your SEO.

But don't forget, there is a pretty annoying limit in the actual web standards : url encoding should only use ASCII character-set. So when you alias your urls, you should remove all special characters, accents, spaces and of course... chinese characters!

We've already seen last time that webmasters are using url encoding functions to deal with this issue. For example in php you can use this urlencode() function : http://cn.php.net/urlencode.
It simply returns a string in which all non-alphanumeric characters except "-" "_" and "." have been replaced with a percent (%) sign followed by two hex digits, like it is said in the web bible.

But this is not the optimum, and you will have to adapt this function in order not to encode some special characters like "é" "à" and "ç"... but just replace them by e a c; and also replace spaces by a "-". In that way search engines can still understand and distinguish your words and keywords.

3- transliteration for chinese characters

Let's see the case of chinese characters now.
The best search engine friendly solution is to automatically change your titles into pinyin cause web search engines are able to :

• recognize pinyin
• identify pinyin words
• link pinyin words and chinese characters

So if you are talking about cars on a chinese website page and your page's title is 汽车.
Now if you use the transliteration into pinyin of this title for your url (http://example.com/qiche), search engines will be able to recognize in this url that the page is about cars.  (qiche is the pinyin for cars)
 

And so you will improve your rankings ;o)

4- using drupal with transliteration

Using the powerful web framework drupal, you will be able to activate all this tips almost without touching a piece of code (we know, that's amazing). I listed for you the modules you will need to activate :

• Clean url : simply activate this to remove the "?q=" in the url
• Path : add the possibility to rename URLs using aliases
• Pathauto : provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage (using page titles for example)
• Transliteration : provides a central service for transliteration

Then, in your pathauto.inc file, simply add this line of code line 170 :
if (module_exists('transliteration'))

{ $output = transliteration_get($output); }

You should now have dramatically improved  your url search engine optimization for chinese content!

would you have good or bad comments, please write them below.

cheers

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...