Traffic Flow SEO

In a great explanation from Bill Hunt in a Search Engine Land article here - How To Get Into Baidu, The World’s 2nd Largest Search Engine he explains about how to get into the organic listings (in addition to paid ads) within Baidu. Read his explanations below:

Is it true the only way into Baidu is via paid ads?

Six months ago, search marketers would have told you the only way to get exposure in Baidu was to buy your way in. For many popular consumer phrases, as many as the first ten to twenty pages of results were all paid ads, which is why many SEO firms in China charged businesses by the click to get them onto the first page of rankings.

Paid ad dominance is no longer the norm under Baidu’s new platform code named “Phoenix Nest” (a.k.a. “Professional Edition”) which was officially deployed in April. Essentially, Phoenix Nest moved paid search listings from the left side to the right side and the top three listings making SERPs look and feel more like western search engines.

In early September Baidu migrated over 800,000 keywords from their old system into the Phoenix Nest platform. This migration has resulted in a significant decrease in the number of paid results on the left side. Those sites lucky enough to backfill the now open SERPS benefit from significantly increased organic traffic.

In a future article I will dig deeper into the characteristics of Baidu’s paid search platform, but for now I can tell you the new platform is very similar to Google’s with many of the same optimization techniques working equally well on Baidu. Just like Google, Baidu has deployed a quality score mechanism called “Comprehensive Rank Index” focused on improving the overall quality of ads for searchers and advertisers.

How can I improve my organic rankings on Baidu?

The good news is most of the normal on page optimization factors you implement to rank well in Google will also improve your rankings in Baidu. The algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s nor does it currently put much weight on inbound links which makes life a lot easier for marketers to make quick changes to their site and start reaping the benefits. Some items that are unique to ranking well in Baidu are:

The site must be in Chinese. The obvious first step to ranking well in organic results is to have content in Chinese. Simplified Chinese is the primary language of Mainland China so it is important to make sure you have used the correct language tags on the site.

The site should be hosted in China. While Baidu has many non-China hosted sites in its database and it is not a requirement to have a .cn domain or be hosted in China, it is a strong recommendation. The main reason for Baidu’s preference for local hosting is due to government firewalls and poor connectivity issues that are common in China. Local hosted sites stand a greater chance of being found and reindexed when they are in China.

Put the most important content at the top of the page. Due to poor connectivity, Baidu’s crawlers want to get as much content as they can and will often simply crawl only the first 100 to 120k of content on a page (remember AltaVista, circa 1998?).

All-Flash sites are a problem. Since marketers could buy their way into Baidu results in the past, many sites did not need to consider the negative implications of Flash only content on their organic search performance. This has been one of the primary reasons many large company sites are having a hard time gaining traction in Baidu’s organic results.

If you are China-ready, look at Baidu’s options to increase market share

The recent changes in Baidu offer a number of opportunities for marketers to maximize their search presence in both paid and organic search. While I am not advocating you jump into the market unprepared, I do strongly suggest you look at the new opportunities with Baidu as a way to expand your market share and sales before your competition does.

To succeed in China it is critical to understand your Chinese consumer, how they use the Internet and how they would engage your products in their local markets. While the opportunities in China are significant, there are still many challenges for Western companies to overcome to be successful. Those ready to embrace these challenges and leverage the new opportunities of Baidu should be on their way to reaping the benefits China has to offer.

If you are interested in advertising (paid ads) in Baidu they have recently introduced an International Support Center in English which can be found here - Baidu International Support Center

The International Support Center also has some great insight into Baidu in general. Here is the information from the 'About Us' page:

Founded in 2000, Baidu, a Chinese language search platform, leveraging the booming Chinese Internet and search engine market , has dominated Chinese online ad market in 2007, generating RMB1.74 billion revenue with at 108% growing rate year on year. Respond to hundreds of millions of queries daily, Baidu represent approximately 70% of total online search queries in China. Over 150,000 small and mid-sized Chinese enterprises, large domestic corporations and Chinese divisions or subsidiaries of large multinational corporations have benefited from Baidu's online search marketing services. Beyond online search, Baidu continues its success in query-based searchable communities with Baidu's Post Bar (BBS) and Baidu Knows (Answers) representing two of the biggest communities in the world.

There is a lot more than covering topics from paid search, brand links, contextual ads, SEM services and the P4P API.

Check it out via the links below:

Search Engine
International Support Center (English)
Advertiser's Website (Chinese)

For those of you in the know using Bookmarking Demon or any other Scuttle Submitter software (as there are many) you know the value of a clean list of Scuttle or Scuttle Plus website, so below is a clean, fresh list of 30 working links:

Scuttle and Scuttle Plus List:

http://alltagz.marketing-boerse.de
http://b.luac.net/tags/fml
http://b24.poel-tec.com/tags/kinder
http://beemylink.de/
http://bookmark.jeuner.de
http://bookmarks.freestuff.gr/tags/business
http://bookmarks.superuser.com.au/
http://brian.carnell.com/bookmarks/tags.php/twitter
http://carolinalegion.org
http://clio.lt
http://coinent.com/
http://community.nuvaa.com/bookmarks
http://cyberfolio.recitmst.qc.ca/recherche
http://debulla.info/
http://designingknowledge.com/
http://distance.ktu.lt/scuttle/
http://do.min.io/
http://edtags.org
http://evilhamster.net/
http://favoris.hetic.net/
http://festic.fr/semanticscuttle/demo/fr/
http://flash-clip.net/
http://gebookt.de/
http://gig.naklo.pl/
http://gonzo.er0k.info/bm
http://ho.tli.st/
http://ipv6links.net/
http://jmtrivial.info/bookmarks/
http://labomedia.lobotomie.org/scuttle/
http://linki.polityk.net/

Good luck and happy submitting!

This actually hurts - WHO really thought this was a good idea? Please fire them now!

The only redeeming thing I can find is the REMIX of the original that makes this pretty funny....:-)

Stumbled on a great little website that does an incredible job collecting data on websites for you. Below is the description from the site:

Quarkbase provides an easier way to find website information. You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase 'whois on steroids' or 'imdb for websites', which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more. Quarkbase saves you from spending hours on search engine finding website details, as it provides you with up-to-date information in seconds for free! Quarkbase is not only a place to get information; it is also a place to contribute website information, share your experience and connect to your webites.

Check it out today at - Quarkbase

Pretty funny...:-)

If you are looking for a great new and free tool to analyze your 'link juice' distribution? Well step right up and check out SpyderMate.

Without creating a free account you can view up to 25 pages of your site, but if with a free account you can view up to 500.

Once you run your site through the system, click on the 'Link Equity' tab and there you will see the below listed data points for each subpage order by Google PageRank (PR):

* Google PR;
* Page full URL;
* Page title;
* Meta description;
* H1 tag;
* Targeted keywords (after the click-through)



You can check it out for free at - SpyderMate

Sometimes the hardest links to acquire are the best for your website. One of the hardest links to acquire are deep links to your website. Below is a list of 50 FREE web directories that accept deep link submissions.

Free Deep Linking Web Directory List:
(source: Best Free Directories)

sonicsyn.com
viesearch.com
counterdeal.com
findinfo.ws
seodir.eu
indexbargains.com
explorethailandonline.com
fringebenefitsparties.com
pluslink.info
ergum.com
globalwebdirectory.co.uk
webnetclick.com
blue-vertigo.net
dhdphoto.com
rwas.org
thailand-hotdeals.com
yvir.com
onemilliondirectory.com
littlewebdirectory.com
etup.org
kk-club.com
ascia2008.com
pmdip.org
webdee.org
netdir.org
directoryexplorer.com
seoaura.com
shadow-x.info
justdirectory.cn
linkdaddy.org
g-seed.biz
http:sitelistings.net
addurl.co.in
linktradecenter.com
top-ten-web-hosting-forum.com
submitlink.info
thecandydirectory.com
ustrustcanada.info
riyi.net
mahikhanonline.com
directorymark.com
diverselist.com
interactive-directory.com
w3c-software.com
directorage.com
temnoticia.com
plainstone.com
gogosun.net
coolwebsitelistings.com
addlink.co.in
fatinfo.com
airedaledirectory.com
discoverism.com

Happy Submitting!

RankSpeed is a very cool new search engine that claims to search by sentiment according to the blogosphere/twittersphere. Here is the information from the actual website:

RankSpeed is a search tool that does a sentiment analysis on the blogosphere / twittersphere to find the best websites, the most useful web apps, the most secure web services, etc...

You can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc...

For each result a statistical analysis computes the percentage of bloggers who have said it is good, easy, ...

For example, a website is ranked as more useful than an other if its name is more often associated with "useful", "helpful" or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.

RankSpeed tracks 3 millions of websites, selects the most commented in the blogosphere / twittersphere and ranks them by your own criteria.

Pretty cool is all I can say as it appears to work pretty well and provides some interesting insights.

Check it out today for free at - RankSpeed

As many of you know, I loved SearchMe and their visual search interface. It was better and faster than anything else out there before it's demise not long ago. Well, I just found my new favorite visual search engine. It is called SpaceTime3D and it ROCKS!

It has been around as a standalone browser since the middle of 2007, but who wants another browser? Recently they launched a version of SpaceTime3D that does not require you to use their browser and/or any plug-in software. This completely changes the game for them (and us).

My only complaint is that they do not have their own database or crawlers they use Google, Google Images, Wikipedia, About.com, Answers.com and Amazon for their data which is good, but could be much more robust. If they do not plan on having their own index and crawlers why not at least make it a meta search engine? Just a thought.

Below is a YouTube video of an example of someone using this new standalone engine:



Anyway you can check it out for yourself below - I wish them luck as their engine sure looks good!

Click here to visit - SpaceTime3D

My favorite web directory is at it again with a special and not well known promo code until the end of September. This code is for 25% off any of their services - web directory listing submissions (my favorite), local listing submissions, blog listing submissions, advertising, etc., etc. All the details are below:

Code: SINCE94

Link: Best of the Web Discount Link (use code on checkout)

Good luck and happy submitting!