On-site SEO factors for Baidu

 

Unique Content

You won’t be surprised to hear that Baidu prefers websites with unique content and penalizes websites with duplicate content. Sometimes the duplicate content penalties given by Baidu are even harder than the penalties inflicted by Google.

Every piece of content on your website should be unique and you should pay extra attention to the pages that may usually pose duplicate content issues, such as taxonomies, category pages, etc. Don’t hesitate to apply the canonical tag on these pages.

Longer Content

Baidu is also considering the content quantity when ranking a website. Every website page that you would want to rank for should have at least 400-500 words. And many studies prove that web pages with long content perform better than pages with short content on Baidu.

Even though Google and Bing don’t necessarily say that the content length is a ranking factor, my personal experience shows that longer content is also an important ranking factor for the western search engines.

Chinese Language Usage

Baidu’s preferred language is Chinese simplified. All website contents, meta tags, and anchor texts should be written in simplified Chinese characters. Baidu prefers simplified over traditional Chinese and doesn’t consider Latin characters.

The use of Latin letters and words is only advised for the website URLs.

It’s also important to consider the specifies of the Chinese language when you optimize for Baidu. In the Chinese language, there are multiple dialects and multiple meanings to a single word. All your Chinese content should be written and proofreader by a native Chinese translator to ensure the correct words are being used.

Meta Title Tags

The meta title tag is one of the most important on-site optimization factors in Baidu’s ranking algorithm. Some even believe that Baidu gives higher importance to meta tags than Google. And among all meta tags, the meta title is probably the most important.

Optimizing meta title tags for Baidu is not much more difficult than writing meta titles for Google, but there are some important characteristics to take into account.

To rank on Baidu, your meta title should:

• be limited to 35 simplified Chinese characters: Normally a simplified Chinese character equals 2 Latin characters, that’s why the meta tags when writing in Chinese should be shorter;
• include the main keyword of the page (your targeted keyword): If possible, use the main keyword in the very beginning of the title tag, even if it may not look very natural;
• include your company or website name;
• use the underscore (_) or the hyphen (-) instead of the space, as words separator: surprisingly Baidu reads and understands the underscore as words separator.  

Company or website name as a keyword

As mentioned above, one of the on-site optimization best practices for Baidu is to always include your website name in the title tag of each page. Ideally, it should be inserted at the beginning of the title tag of your home page and at the end of the title tag of all other pages, for example:

• Home Page title tag: website name_main product/service keyword
• Landing Page title tag: product/service keyword_ website name
• Blog Article Page title tag: article title_ website name

Meta Description Tags:

Unlike Google and Bing, Baidu still uses the meta description tags as a ranking signal.
Each meta description should:

• include your targeted keyword phrase(s)
• include your company or brand name.
• the meta description length limit is 78 simplified Chinese characters.

Meta Keyword Tags

The use of the meta keywords as a ranking factor by Baidu is disputed by a lot of China SEO specialists. Personally, I also consider that, similar to Google and Bing, Baidu has already depreciated the Meta Keyword Tag and I don’t use this tag.

However, you may still find a lot of articles advising you to use the meta keywords tag. If you decide to do so, avoid keyword stuffing and include only 3 to 6 keyword phrases in it.

H1 and other heading Tags

The H1 is probably the second most important tag in Baidu’s ranking algorithm (after the meta title). Each page should have a unique H1 tag containing the targeted keyword. The H1 should appear before any other heading tag. Keyword usage in the other heading tags is also important. And, of course, heading tags should be hierarchized. 

Image ALT Attributes

Baidu’s spiders are using the content form the ALT attribute to understand what an image is about. Some SEO experts assume that Baidu’s image crawling is more simple than Google’s and the image alt text is your only shot to tell the search engine what the image represents and to rank for image searches.

In addition to writing a descriptive alt text, it is also recommended to include the main keyword in the image file name.

Fresh Content

It’s important to regularly update your website and publish fresh content on it. That’s why many B2B websites have company blogs. A blog allows you to increase the internal linking to your main website pages and to put fresh content on a regular basis.

You can also submit your blog feed to Baidu and capture some organic traffic from their news feed 百度资讯.

Link Anchor Text

Another difference between Baidu and Google resides in the greater importance that Baidu gives to the keyword usage in the anchor text. Both internal and external link anchor texts are important to achieve high rankings on Baidu and both internal and external links should have descriptive anchor texts containing the targeted keyword.

In my experience, in opposite to Google, the exact anchor texts are widely used and preferred when you do link building for Baidu. For example, the general recommendation for Google is to diversify your anchor text and to keep a low number of exact anchor texts (between 3% and 10% of all anchor texts). In Baidu however, you can afford to be more generous when it comes to this ratio. Of course, this doesn’t mean to only build links with exact match anchor texts.

Flat site structure

Having a flat, easy to crawl website structure is also of crucial importance to rank well on Baidu. That’s why it’s not rare to see seo agency china with heavy navigation menus or too many text links in the footer: this makes it easy for Baidu to crawl and pass link authority to the main website pages.

Breadcrumbs

The breadcrumb is a nice little addition to the list of on-site SEO factors for Baidu. It is certainly not a primary factor, but similar as with Google, Baidu uses them to better understand the hierarchy of your pages and to distribute link juice.