In this second of two articles on Baidu search engine optimization, you'll learn about the following important items: website analytics data; website trust and the importance of link popularity; Baidu search engine penalty factors and how to recover from a penalty; and some frequently asked questions regarding Baidu search engine optimization.
Website Analytics Data
Baidu recommends improving the following website analytics factors for better websites:
Conversion rate. This is the most important performance metric. It is related to the quality of service offered by the website. Aiming for a standard conversion rate, such as three percent, is good.
Bounce rate. This reflects the quality of the landing page. If the bounce rate is said to be very high, then you need to analyze the causes, such as a mismatch of content with respect to title tags, or a misleading meta description or title tag in search engine results.
Exit rate. If a specific page has a very high exit rate, this might mean either that the page has poor content quality or is loading very slowly, causing visitors to navigate away from the website.
If this page has a high exit rate and is part of the conversion funnel, it is worth checking, so that conversion-related problems can be solved.
User retention time. The length of time a visitor stays on a website is related to the quality of the content. For high quality content websites, user retention time is high because visitors will spend a lot of time reading content.
Importance of Link Popularity and the Trust of the Website
The Baidu search engine measures a website's trustworthiness, its quality and authority by the number of links/citations/shares/bookmarks pointing to the domain.
These are recommendations from the users of the website. So if your website's quality content is substantial and useful, your visitors will recommend it to others in the following ways:
* Linking to the website (this is called an organic link) from their own website. They might mention it in their content with a link to your site.
* Share it with friends in Facebook and other social networking sites. These can be measured by the number of “likes” for that particular content.
* Mention the website in the forums as an answer to a particular problem.
The “recommended information” related to your website will be used by Baidu to judge/assess the value of your website. The higher these recommendations, the better the performance of your website in the search engine results.
To increase the trust of the user for a certain website, Baidu recommends the following:
* The web page should be clear, easy to navigate and read, and user-friendly.
* Make it easy for the user to understand what your website is all about in the shortest span of time.
* Have a detailed site description and contact information so that users can easily contact you and inquire about your services.
* Get some user reviews, customer feedback and other information, which are useful to a new visitor.
* Use a website design that focuses on strengthening the brand, giving users a quicker and better understanding of your website, which then improves trust.
Baidu Search Engine Related Penalty Factors
How does Baidu define deceptive search engine optimization tactics? Any use of search engine optimization strategies that relies on malicious means to get quality content and rankings in search engines, which are inconsistent with search engine guidelines, which results in a poor user experience, will be considered a “deceptive” SEO practice by Baidu.
This will result in some penalty imposed on a website. The following are examples of deceptive practices:
1. A website secretly placing contents and links not visible to the normal user, but only to the search engines.
2. A website hosting malware that will steal user information or compromise privacy.
3. Fake websites of official companies. This is called “phishing;” it is a technique that will attract innocent visitors and lure them into entering their personal information.
4. Websites with a low amount or degree of original content that just contain affiliate links.
5. Websites with links pointing to a malware website (thus compromising user security when they click the link).
6. Websites that are reported to be spammers; for example, executing massive cold calls to scam user money.
Possible penalties:
1. For a light offense, the ranking weight of the website will be reduced; thus, the ranking will fall from its original ranking position.
2. For an extreme offense, the website will be removed completely from the search engine index until it is reported to be clean or the deceptive practices are completely corrected.
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