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

Checking Backlinks in Google

Checking Backlinks in Google

As all SEO professionals know, the back link checker offered by Google (link:yoururl), has been intentionally broken for some time now. While there have been many reasons discussed for why Google broke their own application, it has left SEO professional with a broken tool for checking backlinks on the most poplar search engine, until now.

As of last week, Google has added a new tool to its set of extremely helpful tools available as part of its Webmasters program. According to the Google post on its blog, "Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded".

The good news is that everything Google promised in its post is true. You can now check backlinks to every single page in your web site instead of just the domain. There is a treasure chest of information just waiting to be discovered with this new tool.

The tool does come with some limitations. First and most obvious, you need to sign-up for the Webmaster program (not a big deal and it is free) and secondly you need to verify yourself and the domain you want to check backlinks for. This second step isn’t a big deal either, but it does require that you publish some code to the web site that you are interested in.

So go on and register and check out all the free features of Google's Webmaster service at http://www.google.com/webmasters

Remember if you have questions about this or any other post you can contact me by simply clicking on the Bitwine Icon in the right-hand column.