Chinese SEO + general SEO

I recently talked to somebody that had setup a new business and they wanted some guidance on this question:
"Which marketing channel would be better for us at the beginning: Pay per click or SEO?"
I'll answer this in a way that's relevant to English and Chinese marketing.

First of all, let me say that there is no one-size fits all answer to the question of pay per click (PPC) vs. SEO. It depends on the situation. Read more...

Traffic Now or Traffic Later...

Somebody recently asked me:
"We are currently asking a freelancer to do English-to-Chinese translation on the content found on our main website. I wonder if SEO keyword research could be done now so that we can pass on the info to our translator so that he can keep in mind the various keywords he should use when translating the materials. Or is it more efficient to do this as well as rest of SEO when the Chinese website is up and running? Read more...

Some of the most common questions I hear from website owners that are considering entering the Chinese market are about hosting and domain names. Questions like “Do I need to host my site in China?”, “Should I use a .cn, .com.cn or something else?” and “Will my site get blocked?” Read more...

I received an email asking: “What type of tools are useful for testing broad/exact search volumes (including long tails) for China?”

For this question, I’ll assume that we’re talking about keyword research for a new market, so using data from existing websites isn’t possible.

Here are the 4 tools we use the most.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword tool is an industry standard for English keyword research, and it’s quite useful for Chinese as well. Read more...

This week I posted two new items on sites other than East-West-Connect. Check them out. :)

5 Baidu SEM Tips From the Pros on Clickz.asia - In this article, I listed 5 tips tailored towards the Baidu paid search newbie. Clickz.asia is a blog with marketing news and marketing advice for China and other Asian countries. Read more...

For people that don't yet know much about SEO, it must be a challenge to differentiate between all the different types of SEO service providers out there.
SEO is an industry with no standard professional regulations. It's an industry that anybody can get started in, but that is extremely difficult to master.
I hope to help the would-be SEO client answer this question: "What does it really mean when somebody says they can provide me SEO services?" Read more...

For an SEO project, it's important to check up on a regular basis and make changes where needed. For most projects, I do this on a weekly basis. Read more...

Last week I posted about how to generate a list of Chinese keywords for SEO purposes. Following up on that, I'd like to give some tips on how to evaluate that list of keywords. Which keywords should be used and which shouldn't? Read more...

Somebody recently asked me how they should go about creating a list of potential keywords for their Chinese SEO campaign. They already had an English-language website that was tailored for search engines.

I wrote this post to answer their question. Note that some of my advice below is specific to thinking up keywords for a localized Chinese SEO campaign and some is applicable to keywords for any language.

Now, to start, I’d like to tell you what NOT to do. If you’re coming from the background of English-language marketing, you need to get this into your head: Read more...

Somebody recently asked me:

Would Baidu's advertising platform would be a good way to reach Chinese-reading Internet users based in Australia?

To answer this, it's important to know how much Baidu search traffic there is in Australia. For that matter, how much Baidu search traffic is there outside of China in total? How about USA, the UK, Canada?

To answer these questions, I dug into some statistics for 10 websites. Over the timespan I checked, there were 58,000 visits via Baidu.

This is what I found: Read more...