Getting your Baidu SEO right means a highly profitable website. It ensures you have a large stream of traffic. As long as your site is well-designed and localised to the target market and packed full of engaging copy, SEO will supply your target market ready for your site to convert into customers. A good site is nothing without visitors, so how do you ensure that Baidu – China’s most popular search engine by a mile – properly indexes your site? We take a look at four China SEO musts.

Baidu’s site crawlers do not have the sophistication of Googles spiders, so keeping your site as simple as possible is vital in ensuring all your pages are indexed. Use a tree-like structure, where important pages are found at the top, to allow BaiduSpider to find and index your key pages. Baidu’s crawlers also rely upon the on-page content of your website. You need to make sure that each page is connected by a text link, and it is recommended that the deepest level of information on the website should be no more than four clicks away.

Poor connectivity means BaiduSpider can have trouble crawling your site. This is especially true in lower tier cities, where spiders may only bother to crawl the first 100kb or so of content on a page. This results in far fewer pages being indexed by Baidu. To put that into perspective, last year Google had more than 48billion indexed pages – Baidu had just 800million.

As your site could be accessed through a 3G connection by BaiduSpider, you need to ensure that it is fast and optimised for mobile viewing. With Baidu often only examining part of a page, and indexing far fewer pages than Google does, it is vital that your key Baidu SEO elements and important pages are easy to find to ensure they get indexed.

Simple site design is important for making your site China SEO friendly. Baidu is less sophisticated than Google in terms of the algorithms it uses, so does not read or understand many of the more advanced type of web functions. The BaiduSpider only reads text content, and does not read images or text in images. It ignores frames or iFrames, JavaScript, Ajax and Flash files. This makes plain text content a necessity on your site, otherwise Baidu will have nothing to crawl and your site will not be indexed. If you really must use a Flash website, Baidu recommends having a text version of the site that your Flash site links to.

Unlike Google, Baidu still uses keywords in Meta descriptions for ranking purposes. However, where Google highlights keywords matching the searching criteria by formatting them bold, Baidu highlights them in red. This makes keywords far more visible, so having keywords in your Meta description will make it more eye catching, and therefore encourage people to click through to the page.

(Image source: “SEO diagram” |www.freedigitalphotos.net)