Baidu, China’s equivalent of Google, reaches more than 1.1 million devices. Baidu advertising in China provides fast online promotion with instant results. But if you are looking to establish an online presence in China, you must first have a Chinese business website and optimize it for Baidu.

Baidu’s ranking algorithm is considered by many as a less sophisticated version of Google’s algorithm. There are several factors that affect ranking. Here are 5 quick tips on how to optimize your site for Baidu:

1. Host your website on a server in China

Hosting your website on a server in mainland China will give you a ranking boost. If your web hosting server is located outside China, it will most certainly be very slow. There is also a possibility that it will be unavailable to Chinese users.

You will need to choose a Chinese company to be your hosting partner. Only Chinese web hosting companies can host data on servers in mainland China. If you have an international website, you should consider moving only the Chinese version of your website to a Chinese host.

In order to be allowed to host your website on a Chinese server, you will need a special authorization called an Internet Content Publishing (ICP) license. It is issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. According to Chinese law, all websites must display the ICP number on their homepage.

Also, the domain name is important. Baidu prioritizes .cn domains. Though even a .com or .net website can rank well if it is accessible from China and optimized for it.

2. Publish unique content on your website

Baidu prefers websites with unique and fresh content and penalizes websites with duplicate content. Every piece of content published on your website must be unique and should be updated regularly. Pay extra attention to the pages that may pose duplicate content issues like taxonomies, category pages, etc. You can apply the canonical tag on these pages. A canonical tag tells Baidu that a specific URL is the master copy.

Also, content scraping is a popular practice in China. You can take the help of a digital marketing agency to put in place measures to prevent other websites from lifting unique content from your website and publish it on their websites.

Baidu also considers the content length when ranking a website. Every web page that you want to rank well should have 400 to 500 words. And remember, Baidu’s preferred language is simplified Chinese. Ideally, all your content should be written and proofread by a native Chinese linguist.

3. Give importance to meta title tags

Some believe that Baidu gives more importance to meta title tags than Google. One of the best onsite optimization tactics for Baidu is to include your website name in the title tag of each page. Ideally, it should be entered at the beginning of the title tag of your homepage like this: website name_main product keyword. For all other pages, the website name should be at the end of the title tag. Say for example, for a landing page it should be like this: product keyword_website name. And for a blog article page, the title tag should be like this: article title_website name. If you optimize the landing page like mentioned above, it will help in Baidu advertising (adstochina.westwin.com/Baidu-Advertising) as well.

Unlike Google and Bing, Baidu still uses meta description tags as a ranking signal. Each meta description should include your targeted keyword phrase and also include your company or brand name.

4. Use keywords in the anchor text

Another difference between Google and Baidu is that the latter gives more importance to keyword usage in the anchor text. Both internal and external links are important to achieve a high ranking on Baidu and these links should have descriptive anchor texts containing the targeted keyword.

5. Use Baidu webmaster tools

Baidu webmaster tools is a portal created to help Chinese website administrators and SEO companies monitor and measure a site’s presence in Baidu’s organic search results. With these tools, you can carry out a range of functions like page speed tests, minimizing negative SEO effects, tracking crawling errors, tracking ranking keywords, and optimizing the site for mobile devices.

Do you’ve any questions about Baidu Advertising?