Tips for successfully establishing a web presence in the world's largest Internet market

----By Lindsay Frangs

Doing business in China means doing business online in China. New statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) show that China's Internet users are up 18 percent from the end of 2004. This translates to a whopping 111 million Internet users. How they search and what they are looking for is vital to a company's Internet marketing strategy. If your website lists in the top 10 of a Google China search you are exposing your company to potential customers on a massive scale.

For most foreign companies entering the Chinese market, there is a definitive point in progress when an office, or an operation, needs to be established in China to be successful. The same principle applies to websites. Externally hosting a foreign website in another language will only suffice to a point. Gaining insight on how to successfully launch a Chinese language website through mainland search engines (SEs) is an integral step in marketing your company or product to the masses.

One only has to take a look at the rapidly changing, fiercely competitive and highly publicized SE industry in China to get a feel for the possibilities this market offers.

Last year was an integral year for SE companies trying to leverage or gain a foothold in the Chinese market. Baidu undertook a successful IPO; Google was granted a license to set up office in China and permission to operate under the google.com.cn domain name; and all Yahoo China's assets were snapped up by Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce website, positioning Yahoo with a wide range of tools to deliver e-commerce services to businesses and consumers in China.

This year looks to be equally as interesting in the tit-for-tat battle of the Internet giants.

In January, MSN launched a beta of its Chinese SE, and Baidu released about 3 million shares from lock-up restrictions in an effort to retain employees at a time when Google and Yahoo China are busily recruiting SE specialists in the country. Additionally, they signed an agreement to pay RMB92.4 million (USD11.55 million) for land in Beijing where the company will construct new offices. Google China added to its existing network services like Google Scholar, which gives users on the mainland the ability to search through digital materials provided by libraries worldwide, and Google Bendi, which provides local information for more than 100 Chinese cities and "university search". Furthermore, they are actively employing senior managers and engineers for the research and development center in Beijing.

Rapid expansion

Not only is the competition between SEs rife, a niche group of foreign Internet marketing companies is establishing itself in China. Emporio Asia, based in Shanghai, is one of the earliest entrants to the market establishing their operations in 2001. China Interactive is another. Zunch, a leading US company employed Terrence Ou, a Chinese marketing guru, to establish its operations in Beijing and Shanghai in 2006. Plus there are a handful of smaller operators providing SE optimization services.

So with competition heating up between the leaders, Chinese Internet users are being treated to the best possible access to searching the 677,500 websites registered in China. Understanding what they are looking for and their usage habits will help you to get your site into the mix.

Chinese web surfers under the age of 25 tend to be students, and this tech savvy group spends many hours online searching for MP3, image and game downloads. This group has helped to lift Baidu's usage statistics, as the most popular feature about Baidu, which Google does not support, is the MP3 search. Baidu's MP3 search is very similar to Google's image search, however, it searches for MP3/WMA/SWF files instead of image files.

Baidu's MP3 search is mainly used for Chinese pop music, and the results are surprisingly accurate.

Google has maintained a strong user base in Beijing and Guangzhou and particularly in Shanghai, as Google users tend to be nonstudents, above age 25, with a higher education background and with a higher monthly income. High-end refers to the market share with university or advanced degree monthly income of 3,000RMB or more a month, according to CNNIC. This equates to 19.2 percent of the overall market and a substantial pool of business decision makers.

Yahoo China, Sohu, Sina, 3721 and comparable SEs are categorized in reports as "other", since they are deemed second-tier behind the two Internet giants, Google and Baidu. However, with the waves being made in China's rapidly changing Internet industry these players are still worth considering in any marketing strategy.

Achieving success

These days, building a website and optimizing it for submission goes hand in hand. Advice for successfully establishing a web presence that is referenced in the first-tier SEs involves much more than most would think.

"You can't just submit your website with some keywords in Chinese and hope that the search engines will pick them up," says Vincent Kobler, CEO of Emporio Asia. "We never conduct optimization on its own, we bundle it with our web design."

"To localize the site we recommend improving the copy of the website text to make it more SE friendly; after that we do all the back-end features like embedding keywords, creating inbound links, submitting them to the SEs and creating doorway pages," says Kobler. "In China, the additional factor of Chinese character sets makes website optimization even more complex."

Terrence Ou, Zunch's APAC Business Director & Search Engine Analyst, believes the tricks utilized by companies in the past to achieve high rankings are no longer effective and proper search engine optimization (SEO) is integral.

"We research the hottest Chinese keywords relating to a sector, then we research what people are searching for and the latest changes in algorithms and how SEs are evolving, then we will come up with the Chinese keywords and these will be embedded," says Ou.

"SEO is a mountain of work. You can't just do it for one week and then leave it," warns Ou. "It needs really careful initial set up, testing and retesting and improvement. It is like taking care of a baby, you take care of them for ever, not just initially." Emporio Asia's methodology is similar, and in addition they focus on natural optimization as well as sponsored search engine rankings. "If you want pay-per-click we work with Google or Baidu and pay them for the link. However, we aim to achieve natural SEO in the middle section of the results," says Kobler. "Research has shown that natural SEO can be more relevant than the pay-per-clicks, so we provide a combination of the two."

Above and beyond

A further consideration in achieving a successful online presence is to establish the optimum-hosting scenario for your site. The dominant factor is download speed. Perhaps you are achieving high rankings in the SEs, but when users visit your site they will quickly move on if it is slow to download.

"If your target market is in China, then you really need to be hosted in China to achieve fast download speeds," advises Kobler. "As with most things in China, hosting involves another level of issues. All commercial websites need to register for an ICP license with the Ministry of Information in order to verify that their sites are legal. We help our clients to register for that license." Considering that only 8.5 percent of all Chinese people can count themselves as part of the country's digerati, the potential market growth is astounding. So whether you are considering moving your website into China, or establishing a new one, creating a robust Internet strategy specifically for China is fundamental. Foreign companies targeting Chinese companies and consumers alike need to grab the digital bull by the horns and make headway into the online marketplace.