Let’s look at the official data released by these Internet giants in China:
We can never make sure the accuracy of the data above, as they were all released by the companies themselves.
But what we can know for sure is that these companies have large numbers of users in common. Continue reading
Discuz is a popular Chinese open source CMS for forums and communities, which I wrote a little about in my last post. After that, I was quite amazed some English readers emailed us to ask about SEO issues for these Chinese CMS, especially for Discuz, so Ryan and I decided to wrote an article on SEO for Discuz. We brainstormed, talked to other Chinese SEO experts and listed all the details we think necessary for Discuz SEO:
1. Choose the right version:
There are always two versions of Discuz for you to choose from: UTF-8 and GBK. And I recommend you choosing GBK, an extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters. Although search engines always do full-text search, and in the end they may always know what language your site is in, but why not sort things out for them, so they know it is a Chinese site in the first place?
2. Gzip it to make it faster:
We all know speed is an important factor for SEO that affects spider’s crawling but also if search engines regards your site as a quality one. By default, Gzip is disabled for Discuz. You have to enable it by editing /config/config_global.php, making
$_config[‘output’][‘gzip’] = ‘0’;
Into
$_config[‘output’][‘gzip’] = ‘1’;
3. Edit the information:
One of the things people hate about CMS is that their default settings usually make the section messy.
A good news for you is that Discuz makes it messier,
Let’s take care of it:
Open “\template\default\common\header_common.htm”
Remove “Powered by Discuz” within the ;
Remove “” (optional, if you still believe it benefits your site’s rankings);
4. Let crawlers index your image files:
If you think acquiring visitors via image search is good for your site, you need to let crawlers access your image files. By default, Discuz forbids unregistered visitors from viewing images.
Now you have already known that Twitter is an important part of your SEO and Internet marketing campaign, and you have signed up an account.
What’s next to get the ball rolling?
Below are 7 tips that can help you have a quick and good start:
1. Polish your profile
A detailed profile is necessary. When other people come to you page, before deciding following you or not, they need to know as much about you as possible. So a profile more details about you and your company can definitely win you some trust and good impression.
2. Integrate Twitter with other websites
Do you have a blog, a website a LinkedIn page or a facebook page? If you do, you have no reasons why don’t add them to your Twitter account. Integration of Twitter and those services can make it easier for you to synchronize the updates between various accounts.
3. Interaction
Twitter is about communication, as it is meant to be. No matter what big name you are, your followers may leave you if you have a dead account. Tweet, reply, forward, direct message…do them all to interact with your followers so they know you care.
4. Take it easy
Although I said Twitter is about communication, I didn’t mean you should post a tweet every 3 minutes – it is spamming and your followers will be scared away. 10-15 tweets per day is enough for small businesses.
5. Know the trend
Look at what the hot buzz is and contribute to it. At the homepage of Twitter you can see what the hot topics are. You need to know what people are talking about, and if it is related to your industry, participate and enjoy!
6. Do people a favor if you can
Some of your followers may need your help sometimes, like some questions regarding your industry. Reach out to help them if you can. As Mom told me, good deeds always pay.
7. Take your Tweets outside Twitter
Twitter can be added to other websites or services. For example, you have a business site, then adding Twitter to your site does sound like a good idea, so when you post new updates on Twitter, your updates can also be seen on your website.
Good job! Now you have evolved from a rookie Twitterer to a more advanced one! Keep the trend going and happily look at the number of followers constantly growing. Read more on SEO and Internet marketing.
It has been quite a number of times that people knocked at my door with the question “is there any difference between SEO for large-scale web portals and small business sites?”, so when a friend of mine came to me with the same question yesterday, my answer was and will always be yes.
He was once my student on Chinese SEO and recently, he just resigned from a small company and was luckily hired as SEO project manager for a Chinese news portal.
Here is what I told him yesterday:
We all know the power of links when it comes to SEO, but regarding the scale of a website, we should apply different link development strategies.
For a small business website that has tens of webpages, external links have more power to boost its rankings, compared with internal links. The site owner should look for good link resources to develop efficient link building campaigns.
But for a web portal that contains millions of web pages, the story is different. Internal links are of greater importance to large websites, 90% of whose traffic comes from long-tail search queries. Those search terms are the ones that you may never thing of so it is impossible to build links targeting those keywords.
There are numerous webpages out there, waiting for spiders to crawl, and on a large-scale website, it is pretty common that millions of pages are still “unseen” by spiders even after years since they were created. So to a web portal, better indexation, namely onsite SEO is more important.
As commonly acknowledged, URL structure is crucial to SEO. URL is the door where spiders enter your site, so the quality of URLs determines if spiders can have a good understanding of your site. Today I would like to share with you the top 9 tips on URL improvement.
1. No deep nesting
Limit the subdirectory level under 4. Users and spiders don’t like deep nesting of subdirectories like “…/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/dir5/1.html”. This can cause a waste of link juice and is also hard for users to remember the URL.
2. Insert keyword in the URL
As I said above, URL is the door where spiders enter your site. Keywords in URL is like a number plate that informs spiders of what is the house. Notice: do not insert too many. Adding 2-4 keywords sounds wise.
3. Remove the session ID within URL
Session ID with in URL can confuse spiders and make them suspect you have duplicate content.
4. Reduce variables in URL
Variables within URL can trap spiders and make the crawl the same URL again and again. It is a waste of time and resources to search engines as well as your own websites.
5. Use dash to separate Keywords
Do not use “_” but “-” to separate keywords within URL.
6. Use lowercase URLs
URLs are case-sensitive so you should be converted to lowercase.
7. Keyword in filename is better than keyword in directory name
Emphasize the keyword by putting it as the file name rather than directory name.
8. URL canonicalization
Specify the canonical URL to each unique page.
9. 301 redirect
After tweaking the URL, always remember using the 301 redirect to point the old URL to the new one.
After applying the 9 tips into practices, the URL structure of your website will be definitely more search engine friendly and your ranking will be improved.