Companies that want to market to Chinese speakers must first decide on their target markets. Who are they trying to reach? But first let’s define some China SEO terms.

What is China SEO?

For the keyword China SEO there are a few meanings:

1. Someone who wants find an SEO company to market to China.

2. Someone who wants to learn something about getting natural traffic from people who speak Chinese (This could include one or more of the following: China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and even small numbers of Chinese speakers in other countries).

3. Someone who wants to work with a China SEO company for a variety of reasons. For example, if Chinese is your mother tongue it may be easier to launch a global SEO campaign working with people who understand you easily.

A company outside of China looking for information or SEO China companies would be interested in search results which focused on the meanings from 1 and 2. Search results for number 3 would mostly be in Chinese. However the savvy Chinese company which wants to do a global campaign may search in English or other target countries to narrow results.

Baidu.com is the most popular search engine in China

What is Chinese SEO?

Chinese SEO is more specific than China SEO and one of the indicators of this is that there are fewer searches for Chinese SEO. The intents of these searchers can be:

* Someone looking for somebody to help with SEO, in the Simplified Chinese language, in order to target mainland China, Singapore and some Chinese expatriates.

* Someone looking for somebody to help with SEO, in the Traditional Chinese language, in order to target people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and most Chinese expatriates.

Simplified and Traditional Chinese use different characters for the same word so it is important not to make a mistake about this. For example, if you were manufacturing chop sticks in Tel Aviv and you wanted to sell to restaurants in mainland China you would target this keyword in Simplified Chinese – yÉ ô+wP6 ‘

If however you wanted to sell to companies in Hong Kong you would write in Traditional Chinese – yÉ­+wPý à.

Chinese SEO Company Search

Now that we have our terms defined, it is obvious that the first thing we need to do is define our geographic markets. This will determine, for the most part, if we need Simplified or Traditional Chinese. Then we can search for a vendor who has the appropriate language skills. If we prefer to look for a company located in our target market, we must search in the appropriate search engine. You can use Google and press the radio button which limits the search just to sites in that country.

Here are some examples:

Hong Kong: google.hk (Traditional Chinese)

Singapore: google.sg (Simplified Chinese)

Taiwan: google.com.tw (Traditional Chinese)

PRC China: google.cn (Simplified Chinese-cannot access from inside China)

Traditional Chinese google.com/intl/zh-TW/

Simplified Chinese google.com/intl/zh-CN/ (If you are in China and type in Google.com you will be redirected to this site)

Of course, in China, baidu.com (in Simplified Chinese) or tw.baidu.com (in Traditional Chinese) is much more popular than Google. Although the interface is in Chinese you can search in English.

Another option is to look for a vendor who speaks your language. This kind of SEO company will be easier to communicate with and will most likely be able to offer additional languages, so you won’t have to deal with so many vendors. This kind of search is relatively easy. For example, a good place to find an SEO company that can provide International SEO services is Israel, as it is an immigrant society with native speakers of many languages. A search for:

Chinese SEO Israel

brings up an SEO company which can handle Chinese SEO and many other languages

Using non Chinese SEO companies for SEO China work can make communications easier

Another option is to do Chinese SEO in house. You may have in house Chinese speakers or you can use outside vendors just for translation. In any case, this SEO China article gives you a basic start, so you won’t waste your money translating to Traditional Chinese when your target market is in Mainland China.

Chinese Characters

You can learn about using Chinese characters in the URL in this post. One of the most important things to do is make sure your translations are not literal-use the keywords that your searchers use.

Chinese characters can be used in the URL.

Although Chinese SEO can look daunting to English speakers because the characters are so different this, it is now easier than ever due to technology. You can even get a quick translation The Google Translator for example can translate both Simplified and Traditional Chinese to English and back. It can also translate Simplified to Traditional Chinese and back. Today there is no excuse not to communicate with over a billion people.

Learn more about Chinese SEO and SEO China at AIMS Advanced Internet Marketing Strategies. An illustrated version of this article is available at http://www.aims.co.il/articles/chinese-seo.html