The Best Way To Optimize Websites For Baidu

Baidu is a search engine for websites, audio files, and images founded by two (2) Chinese nationals who studied abroad. It is undoubtedly the biggest search engine in Mainland China. It has the largest search engine market share in the country that has become the second largest economy after the United States of America. China population is about four times that of the US and the penetration of Internet usage is increasing every day. Right now China is the world’s largest Internet community, counting by users. So, it makes a lot of sense to optimize one’s website for Baidu. After all, the major search engines which dominate the search market in other countries experience hardships while trying to break into the Chinese market. Among others, Google has also failed to compete favorably in China. That leaves only Baidu standing tall in the world’s second largest economy.

Drawback:

Baidu is adamant for its dedication to only websites that have Chinese content. So, if your site has nothing to do with China, the possibility of it ranking well on Baidu SERPs is very remote. You can rightly say it is a search engine programmed by Chinese for Chinese. But don’t worry, because I will tell you later a totally white hat method that details how to beat that.

Why optimizing for Baidu?

China is a fast-growing economy and an emerging market that has even overtaken Japan. Making your website visible over there can mean more business for you. Chinese people are always searching for people outside their country to collaborate with.
Baidu is the only search engine majority of people use in China. It is the most popular homepage of millions of computers across the country. If you’re looking for Chinese business partners, it makes a lot of sense to optimize your site for Baidu.
Baidu is the sure-fire way to build an enduring brand in the world’s fastest-growing economy.
Your competitors might be optimizing their sites for Baidu, without your knowledge. So, get on board and get even!
A greater number of Chinese people speak only Chinese language and Baidu is their window to the outside world. Majority of them don’t care about foreign search engines, out of patriotism.

How to successfully optimize a site:

Create a Chinese language version of your website. This action alone will authenticate your website as having content related to China.
Add the following meta tag in the head <head> section of the web pages (the Chinese version): <META http-equiv=”Content-Language” content=”zh-CN”>. It is the standard Simplified Chinese language declaration tag. This tag will help Baidu search crawler to easily identify your site as Chinese. I’ve seen a few sites that use “zh-Hant” instead of “zh-CN”, but the later is more widely supported.
Get backlinks from Chinese websites. Try your best to gather a tangible amount of quality backlinks from website hosted in mainland China. These incoming links should originate from sites related to your site’s content. Links from Hong Kong and Taiwan-based sites will also help, as they’re parts of the Chinese territory. All these inbound links will surely help your site to rank well on Baidu SERPs for your chosen keywords, as long as they come from quality and relevant sites.
Hire a Chinese-speaking SEO expert to do off-page optimization for you. Because of the language barrier, it is recommended to get a Chinese to do off-site SEO for the Chinese version of your site. This will guarantee the work will be properly done.
Submit your homepage officially to Baidu through its URL submission page: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html. Though Baidu does not guarantee that your submitted link will be indexed, it will certainly do that, if you followed my guideline properly.

You have seen why every webmaster needs to optimize his/her website for Baidu, as well as how to do it. Once your site complies with Baidu’s relevant standard, submit the homepage, and wait for approximately one month to crawl and subsequently it.