2007-10-25

Baidu SEO

One of the benefits of running my SEO Tools and Resources Directory is people are always sending me in suggestions of new SEO tools or Search Engine Optimization resources.

I personally review all submissions and decide on which items to added to my ever growing list. Unfortunately, most submissions are not up to my standards. I was however pleasantly surprised by todays submission.

Today's submission was for an on-line article about Baidu (the most popular search engine in China) and how SEO for Baidu is different then SEO for Google or the other major search engines. While the English used in this article is not perfect, the message and methodology is clear.

Key points of the article include the use of simplified Chinese as the character set, use of specific meta tags (once again in simplified Chinese) and use of domain names an hosting locations. Over the SEO techniques described are nothing that don't apply to other search engines, but the specific combinations of elements are a bit different.

So if you're interested in marketing your web site to China and want to be optimized for Baidu give this article a read www.baidupro.com

2007-10-21

The Description Meta Tag

The description meta tag, is frequently overlooked by HTML coders and copy writers. Yet, the importance of this tag has never gone away.

Some of us in the SEO community feel it is an important element in the various search engine algorithms, while some others do not. According to Google "While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results." Yet, I've seen sites rankings improve in Google with a simple rewrite of the description meta tag. So who do you believe? That's up to you and regardless, the mere fact that in many instance it will be displayed in the search results to describe the page, make it an important sales message to improve click-through rates.

If the search engine is your new home page, you not only need effective page titles (the first line of a search result listing), but an effective description meta tag. This tag needs to be more then just loaded with keywords, it needs to be engaging, and convince the searcher (if they see this element) to click on your listing. After all, being number one in search results with an uninviting page title and description, won't get your site any traffic.

As a reminder, the format of the description meta tag is
<meta name="Description" content="informative description here">

This is why, my firm K'nechtology always stress the importance of this tag and has developed a specialty of writing effective description meta tags. Effective description meta tags must be part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

For more information on this subject, here is a link to a great article from Google on the subject matter (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/querystats?siteUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.knechtology.com%2F&hl=en).