Expanding into China can be a very lucrative strategy. The population of internet users in the country is growing all the time. By entering the market online, you can minimise the risk, and maximise the gain. In order to make a success of your Chinese online marketing, you’ll need to make sure your customers can find you. For this you need to understand Chinese SEO.

While Chinese SEO and Western SEO work on the same principles, there are some differences it is very important to know. The most vital of these is that Google is not the most popular search engine in China. In fact, with a market share of just 3%, it barely registers. In China, the biggest search engine is Baidu with a 63% share of the market. In order for your Chinese SEO to succeed, you need to know how Baidu likes things to be done.

Last year, Baidu updated its policy regarding link building. While it now values link building, there are many ways in which your site can be penalised if you do it wrong. Simply exchanging plenty of backlinks with irrelevant sites, for example, won’t work. If you want good backlinks that improve your SEO, you need to have strong content, written in Simplified Chinese, that people want to share and link to.

Meta tags is still important in the Chinese internet. Meta tags is content that isn’t seen by site visitors, but is used by search engines to value its relevancy. Google stopped using meta tags a while back because it can be quite easy to misuse. Baidu still takes meta tags into account, so now might be a good time to freshen up on your meta skills.

Use the right language. Baidu uses Simplified Chinese when it looks for keywords and meta tage. You need to make sure that you are writing in the right form of the language. For this, it is a good bet that a native Chinese speaker will be required.

Knowing the main tools will make things easier. In the West you may know about Google Keyword Tool, but in China you need to use the Baidu Keyword Tool, Baidu Relevant Search, Baidu Index and the Live Keyword Ranking Feed.

Search engines like Baidu take into account the government firewall and censor content accordingly. Therefore, if you want to get your site ranked highly, it is really important that it doesn’t include any banned content. Read up on the Great Firewall of China in our blog post here.

The Chinese market is a hugely lucrative one for Western companies. All it requires is the right skills to unlock. At Market Me China, we offer you those skills. We can get you established in the Chinese market, putting your business where it needs to be online, making you visible, and letting people know who you are and what you do.

Get in touch today to talk Chinese SEO.

(Image source: “Seo With Lens” | www.freedigitalphotos.net)