Taiwan, one of the Four Asian Tigers, is the home country of some of the world widely known brands such as Acer, ASUS, BenQ, HTC and Giant. It has the population of 23 millions all use traditional Chinese, is the place where Traditional Chinese is most commonly used in the world. The major search engine is Yahoo! KIMO, and the most popular social network is Wretch and Plurk.

Facts you need to be aware when starting your SEO project for Taiwan search marketing:

1. Use the keyword tool provided by Yahoo! KIMO to start your keyword research. The keyword suggestion tool in the search box is a good keyword indicator as well.

2. Taiwanese tend to blend Taiwanese and Traditional Chinese together when they write and talk. Hiring a Taiwanese SEOer to give you a hand in your on-page optimisation to seize all the keyword opportunities.

3. Yahoo! KIMO allows up to 45 Chinese characters to be showed in the Title and 102 characters in the Description. Place keywords within the limit!

4. Yahoo! KIMO shows the result of Yahoo Knowledge+ at the bottom of the SERP. Use it to build your brand reputation.

5. Blog on Wretch. Wretch is even more popular than Google in Taiwan. Many people use it like a search engine to find information they need. Create a nice and niche blog on it to help users know your brand.

For the SEO campaigns that target Taiwan’s search market, apart from the above 5 points, SEO tips apply on Yahoo, Google and other major search engines will do the job. Research your target country first to get some good insights of its search market always guarantee you a good start!

2. Utilise the DESCRIPTION tribute to help search engines and users to understand your landing page content.

3. Construct your site with clear hierarchy, the more important the page is, the closer it should be to the root domain. Make sure all pages are connected with at least ONE internal text link.

4. Use text instead of flash or Javascript in the content and links. Baidu temporarily can’t identify Flash and Javascript content.

5. Avoid frame and iframe site structure. Content displayed with iframe can be abandoned by Baidu.

6. For dynamic pages, reduce and control the length of the parameters can help Baidu index your pages better.

7. 301 redirect your sites/ pages when you migrant or redesign your website.

8. Create quality and unique text content for users instead of focusing on search engines. Any invisible content or links inside the site will be treated as cheating by Baidu and therefore be penalised.

9. Be careful when exchanging links with other sites. The quality of the sites your site is linking to can have impact on your ranking.

10. Use robot.txt to restrict the access of Baidu spider to pages of your website that share identical content.

For how to optimise your website to maximise the visibility in the SERP, you can refer to the 5 most important factors for Baidu optimisation.

Chinese: Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Philippines, Singapore, S. Africa, Taiwan, Thailand
English: Australia, Belize, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroon, Canada, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, The Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Ireland, Israel, Lesotho, Liberia, Malaysia, Micronesia, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Somalia, S. Africa, Suriname, Swaziland, Tonga, U.K., U.S., Vanuatu, Zimbabwe, many Caribbean states, Zambia
Spanish: Algeria, Andorra, Argentina, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Rep., Ecuador, El Salvador, Eq. Guinea, Guatemala, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Spain, Togo, Tunisia, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela.

As a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, the difference between my mother tongue and the Mandarin used in China and other countries where people speak the same language is huge. If you  ever meet people who are from a different cultural background but speak the same language as you, I believe you feel the same as I do.Very often, what a term can mean in one culture can have a completely different meaning or does not even make sense in another. That’s why we need to localise the website, and even SEO!

A vivid example is how 牛 is used in Chinese. Let me give you a Title tag from a Chinese website as an example:HTC Desire: 宏達電子2010年最牛手機

To a Mandarin Chinese speaker from China, the sentence will be understood as ”HTC Desire: the best HTC mobile phone in 2010”

But to a Mandarin Chinese speaker from Taiwan, the sentence actually means “HTC Desire: the really COW HTC mobile phone in 2010″ – which doesn’t even make sense.

From here we can see the importance of SEO localisation. As 牛 means cow, bull or cattle in general, but only in China it can also means “the best.” In the case of the Chinese title, it makes perfect sense to Chinese speakers in China but not in Taiwan at all. If a site is using this title in it’s web page to target searcher in Taiwan, the site will not only look silly, but also will miss the opportunity to convert the searchers even it ranks top 1 as it looks not credible to the site visitors.

In conclusion, if you are thinking about doing SEO for your site which will be targeting at foreign markets, always translate and localise your site first. If you are doing SEO for the site yourself, ask people from the foreign markets you are aiming at to help localise your SEO project. If you are hiring professional SEOers to assist your international marketing project, always make sure the people whom you consult with do have SEOers from your target countries to process the optimisation.

What is hotpot and what exactly is its relationship with link building, you may wonder.

Let’s explain what is hotpot first. Hotpot (火鍋) is a typical main dish in east Asia. Usually you need to prepare many ingredients from meat, vegetable, tofu, bean curd products to even dumplings made especially for hotpot dish and glass noodles. After you get all the ingredients, here comes the most important thing for hotpot dish preparation:  a well seasoned and flavored soup base as whether a good hotpot can be made all depends on it. The way to eat it is simple, just wait till the soup is boiled, add all the ingredients you like and then wait till they are cooked, it’s time to dig in. But some rules need to be remembered, always finish the ingredients you put in the pot first before you add in more.  No putting all of the ingredients in the pot in one go, always do it gradually.

Now comes to the main point of this post, what is the hotpot to do with link building? How it works is simple: imagine the hotpot is your website and the ingredients are the inbound links. In basic SEO theories, a website should have quality backlinks to help to build its authority. The same for hotpot, the more quality ingredients you add in it, the better it is.

Where can it go wrong?

You are making an authentic Chinese hotpot meal, but the ingredients provided are all for pepperoni pizza. Gross! Ruin both the hotpot soup, the pepperonis and the cheese. People want to eat the hotpot don’t want to see cheese floating in the soup while people who would like some pizza are not expecting to see their pepperonis sinking in the pot. If you are building links to your website, make sure links are from web pages with similar content to your site. The same rule apply to directories. If your site is about selling Taiwanese food, submit your site under the category of East Asian cuisine rather than Italian. Add some decent sliced meat and fish balls to your hotpot!

Fussy Eaters

If they don’t like what you serve them, they don’t eat it. Imagine the eaters are search engines, some are not difficult to please, like Google, as long as the meal served is fresh and with the right ingredients. Some are like Baidu, not easy to be happy unless you server everything right or drug them. The best practice for these fussy eaters is: make sure the ingredients are right for the meal and at best to have them come from the place where the dish is from. If you are building links for a site that aims to rank better in Baidu, apart from ensuring you have many quality links from relevant contents to the one of your site, try to have them come from sites in China as well. Neutral domains like .com or .org are common in China, so Baidu tends to use the server location of the inbound links and the number of these links to determine the destination site are relevant to Chinese users or not.

Conclusion

Know who are coming to your hotpot dinner party when you plan to have one! Serving hotpot with many right and quality ingredients is always the best strategy. As for fussy eaters? Depends on they are important to you or not. If they are, get the ingredients from quality shops of the right countries. You won’t be let down by the review they give you afterward.

1. Speak your audience’s language

Speak the users’ language is the best way to get to the users’ heart, so having your site content in simplified Chinese is absolutely vital. Hiring a native Chinese translator is preferable. If not, always ask a Chinese linguist to help you localise your web content as apart from China, Chinese language is widely used in countries like Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, and each country all has it’s unique way of expression in the language. What makes sense in one country doesn’t always make sense in another.

2. Create unique text content

Baidu is like most search engines, still not able to see content in Flash. Creating unique and rich text content not only enable your website to be indexed by the search engine but also draw the visitors’ attention and hence decrease the bounce rate.

3. Keyword your content

Understanding the search trend of your target market is the base of a successful marketing campaign. Having the up-to-date keywords that searchers use to optimise your web content not only can increase the conversion rate but also improve your web page ranking. More information about what tools to use for your Baidu optimisation, please refer to Keyword Research Tools for Simplified Chinese SEO Campaign.

4. Links, Links, Links

Link is one of the major factor that Baidu takes into consideration whether it should serve your website in its SERP. Get as many quality links from authority sites and sites with topics related to yours as possible can only do you good. Don’t worry if your website server is outside China, as long as you can build enough backlinks from sites based in China, Baidu is happy to serve it as well.

5. Create an User Oriented Website

Usability is what marketers tend to forget when it comes to SEO. Only websites that are genuinely related to what the searchers are looking for have the best chance to draw the users’ attention and stand out. A pure search engine oriented website can drive the visitors away after they click through the landing page as what’s on the page tends to be not what they are looking for. So the best way to stand out in Baidu, apart from achieving the above 4 factors, is to have a genuinely interesting site!

So what are the exact tools we need when doing a simplified Chinese keyword research? The answers are Baidu Keyword Tools.

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China, accounts for around 75% of the search market. People in China say 百度一下(baidu it) instead of Google it when it comes to searching on the internet. The Chinese search engine provides many useful keyword tools not just for the users but marketers as well. The below are the tools you may want to give it a try when you have a simplified Chinese keywords research project at hand:

1. Baidu PPC Keyword Suggestion Tool

Very easy to use Chinese SEO keyword tool,  similar to Google Adword Keyword Tool. The only down side is you need to have a PPC account with Baidu then you will be able to use it. The search term I used here is 熊猫 (panda), and the top 10 results are (sorted by search volume):

熊猫人 (Panda Man)

熊猫围棋

熊猫

熊猫游戏

熊猫大侠

功夫熊猫

吉利熊猫

熊猫玩具车

熊猫卫士

熊猫看书

2. Baidu Search Box Keyword Suggestion Tool

If you don’t have a Baidu’s pay search account to access the above keyword tool, no need to be desperate. Baidu’s search box nowadays provide keyword suggestions as well. The below are the keywords Baidu suggested when I inputted the keyword 熊猫 (panda):

熊猫人 (Panda Man)

熊猫人电视剧

熊猫大侠

熊猫看书

熊猫人演员表

熊猫人插曲

熊猫人片尾曲

熊猫人主题曲

熊猫侠

熊猫看书官网

3. Baidu Index 百度指數

Very similar tool to Google Insights but provides very detailed analysis related to the keyword you search, from relevant keywords, rising keywords, searchers’ age range, gender, education background and location. By inputting 熊貓 (panda) here, apart from getting relevant search terms as below:

熊猫人 (Panda Man)

熊猫人电视剧

熊猫大侠

熊猫人演员表

熊猫看书

功夫熊猫

熊猫人全集

熊猫侠

熊猫看书官网

吉利熊猫

I also got the insights that most people who searched this term are students locate in Beijing and Shanghai, age range 10-29. Searchers tend to be more males then females.

Conclusion

If you are starting a Chinese SEO campaign, Baidu PPC keyword tool and Baidu index can give you a more marketing related insights. On the other hand, if you are just interested in knowing what are the popular terms related to the keyword you want to search, the keyword suggestion tool comes with the Baidu search box should be sufficient enough.

For a thorough Chinese SEO campaign consultancy, you may want to have a look at the Chinese SEM page of the agency I work for.

Also, you may all have realized, the most popular search in China related to Panda is Panda Man!