Multilingual SEO Best Practices: Taiwan

Doing SEO for international campaigns till now, one thing that always puzzles me is that when clients came to consult us for SEO project for Chinese market, the first thing they said tend to be that they want to set a foot in the market by having a simplified Chinese website that targets China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and whatever countries they could think of with Chinese as the main language. THIS IS A MISTAKE, I’m afraid I have to say! To shed some light to this common belief that marketers mistakenly share, I will be posting some multilingual SEO best practices for search marketing for several Chinese speaking countries. The first one I want to start with is the SEO strategies for Taiwan.

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!