Baidu SEO : challenges and intricacies of marketing in China

137 Pages·2017·7.684 MB·English

by  Duong, Véronique

Baidu SEO
FOCUS SERIES

Baidu SEO

Challenges and Intricacies of
Marketing in China

Véronique Duong
First published 2017 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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ISTE Ltd John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2017
The rights of Véronique Duong to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935105

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISSN 2051-2481 (Print)
ISSN 2051-249X (Online)
ISBN 978-1-78630-111-6
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Chapter 1. Baidu, Its Services and Its Competitors . . . . . . . 1
1.1. The history of Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. Very “rich” Search Engine Results Page . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3. Baidu versus HaoSou and Sogou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.4. Baidu’s services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.5. Eye tracking on Baidu versus Google . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.6. How does “BaiduSpider” work? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.7. Understanding the difference between crawl
and indexing on Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Chapter 2. Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO . . . . . . 13
2.1. Purchasing a domain name with a “.cn” extension . . . . 13
2.2. Choosing a domain name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.3. Hosting a site in Hong Kong and/or in China . . . . . . . 14
2.3.1. Recommended hosting companies . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3.2. Case study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.4. Chinese mobile telephone line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
2.5. Optimizing an HTML code for Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.6. Is HTTPS protocol incompatible with Baidu? . . . . . . . 20
2.7. “Baidu MIP”, a new feature for mobile pages in 2016 . . 22
2.8. Encoding a Chinese site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.9. Baidu’s “Webmaster Tools” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
vi Baidu SEO
2.10. Check that the robots.txt complies with the
Baidu guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
2.11. How should a robots.txt with a high number
of restrictions be managed? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
2.12. Tags and attributes that are not
compatible with Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.12.1. The rel=“canonical” attribute does not
work on Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.12.2. The hreflang attribute does not
work on Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.12.3. Micro data tags (Schema.org) do not
work in Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.13. Baidu’s V1, V2 and V3 icons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.14. The “official site” icon on Baidu (官网) . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.15. The Pomegranate algorithm (石榴) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.16. The Money Plant algorithm against
external spam links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.17. Sitemap for Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.18. Submitting URLs to Baidu automatically . . . . . . . . 39
2.19. Adapt your mobile site to Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.20. Declaring a mobile site in Webmaster Tools . . . . . . . 43
2.21. Baidu’s official good practices for optimizing
a mobile site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.22. Why should you have a Responsive Design site? . . . . 45
2.23. Managing the redesign of a site for Baidu . . . . . . . . 47
2.24. Simple and ordinary URLs for Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.25. URL formats for press sites for Baidu news . . . . . . . 50
2.26. The negative impact of empty
internal results pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.27. Problems with link analysis and
Rapid Positioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Chapter 3. Semantic and Editorial Advice and
Tips for Baidu SEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.1. Baidu Index: a useful platform for studying
search trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.2. Baidu’s keyword generation tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.3. Keywords and ranking: Term Frequency–Inverse
Document Frequency statistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Contents vii
3.4. The length of the title and meta description
meta-tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.5. The influence of keywords on Baidu SEO . . . . . . . . . . 58
3.6. The importance of keyword density . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.7. Strategy for keywords and SERP analysis . . . . . . . . . 61
Chapter 4. Subjects Related to Baidu SEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.1. Baidu Certified Marketing Specialist certifications . . . 65
4.2. Baidu’s browser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
4.3. Connecting to a social network directly
from the SERPs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
4.4. Chinese e-commerce and Baidu SEO:
current trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.5. AutoNavi is outperforming Baidu Maps . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4.6. Social networks and Baidu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Chapter 5. Methodology of a Baidu SEO Campaign . . . . . . . 75
5.1. First step: kick-off meeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.2. The SEO project reverse schedule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.2.1. How is a Gantt chart created? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.3. The technical audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu . . . . . . 80
5.4. The semantic audit for Chinese SEO on Baidu . . . . . . 81
5.5. Keyword analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.6. Optimizing Chinese meta-tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.7. Optimizing headings tags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.8. Optimizing textual content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.9. Optimizing Chinese URLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
5.10. Optimizing text anchors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5.11. Optimizing images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
5.12. Optimizing breadcrumbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
5.13. Dragon Metrics: a special position monitoring
tool for China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
5.14. Netlinking: searching for external links . . . . . . . . . . 94
Chapter 6. Beyond Baidu SEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
6.1. Advice on SMO optimization for WeChat . . . . . . . . . . 98
6.2. Advice for social marketing on Weibo . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
viii Baidu SEO
6.3. Mei Nu in China: a marketing method . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.4. Wang Hong (网红): the new online
promotion model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Preface

“Choose a job you love, and you will
never have to work a day in your life”.
CONFUCIUS
I have noticed that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for
Asian search engines is not discussed much in the West. This
is particularly true of Baidu, which is the most popular
search engine in China and one of the five most consulted in
the world. Advice and tips for Chinese SEO are often vague.
I therefore decided to write this book, based on official
reports from Baidu, in order to help and guide people,
companies and brands wishing to be ranked, and therefore
visible on Baidu and other Chinese search engines (HaoSou,
Sogou, etc.).
As well as examples of, and advice on, SEO for Chinese
search engines, in the second part of this book the reader
will find tips for carrying out marketing in China using
social networks, such as Weibo and WeChat, as well as “the
Meinu tactic”, which works very well in China.
This book draws on my experience, research and analysis.
It is particularly based on 5 years I have spent as a
x Baidu SEO
CESEO-certified SEO consultant, and on my work with
AUTOVEILLE and ASVD (founded in 2010 and 2013,
respectively), two organizations specializing in Chinese SEO
and e-reputation management in China, which support the
most prestigious multinational brands as well as start-ups
in their set-up, development and visibility on the Asian
Internet. This book is aimed at people who already know a
little about Google SEO and SEO agencies wishing to
develop on the international stage.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all the people who have supported
me and believed in me during all these years of technical and
scientific research in the constantly evolving discipline of
Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
My particular thanks go to all those who guided and
supported me in the writing of this book:
– my family: my father, mother and sister;
– Alexandre Sisavanh (friend and ASVD partner, who
gives me advice and support every day);
– Zsuzsanna Barabas and Manuela Sánchez Pérez
(friends who are always ready to listen);
– my Master’s lecturers: Jean-Michel Daube and Damien
Nouvel (INALCO);
– my friends, who are an important part of my life;
– the members of SEO Camp;
– my colleagues at Fabernovel Data & Media (Geoffrey,
Antoine, Tony, Steve, among others);
Preface xi
– my former colleagues at Datawords (Yaou, Yufeng,
among others);
– my former colleagues at Red-On-Line (Ros, Alda, among
others).
Véronique DUONG - 楊傳潔
CEO at AUTOVEILLE
Twitter @veroduong
April 2017