International SEO: Hotpot Theory for Link Building

Yesterday I was invited to join a nice hotpot dinner with quite a few colleagues. Really enjoyed it, and the meal actually inspired me to write this post.

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.