How the site can improve its rank index in Baidu?

Hi All,
I am starting my wedding photography business in China,
A whole website is translated to Chinese, etc. but i am struggling to get any traffic from BAIDU,
BAIDU is no. 1 choice for all the Chinese citizens,

So i wonder how does this search engine work?

i saw a helpful post here: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/baidu-seo-must-haves.2636262/#post-18681132

Although understanding what can boost visibility of my website to around 700 million internet users in China, this is my target,

Any tips, tricks?

The website is hosted in Hong Kong,

i learned that this is a good move when the website was hosted on US servers and had extremely slow round-trip times around 500-600 ms.

 

There are some things that you need to understand, first is I am not the regular user of Baidu in fact for me Google is more like God, but as I have seen your thread un-replied, I thought of giving you some help on this.... pardon me if something I have said is incorrect as my reply is based on the analysis and search using my god Google. Well, for making you understand in a simple way I would try to answer your question using Q/A:

1) Is your site hosted in China?
Ans: Well, some naysayers said that if your site is not hosted in China than you should except poor ranking from Baidu. So, if you can get your website hosted in Chine then I think you can get onto better condition. As, it is said that your ranking would be impacted as it's not safe for Baidu.

2) Usefulness of sitemaps on Baidu?
Ans: Well, i don't think sitemaps effect much on Baidu search ranking.

A piece of Advice:
- adding local hosting is highly recommended, like I said that Baidu ranking depends on the hosting i.e. wether your site is hosted in china or not.
- Slow Speed of the page is another factor that is going to effect you ranking in Baidu as if search engines can't crawl your page than you are not going to be in the ranking list and that means no traffic.
- One of the loop hole I can find for you is the paid ads in Baidu, there is a whole lot of space available for ads try that out in order to prioritize your presence in Baidu and your traffic expectations.
- Well, having some SMO activities targeted to the Chinese market is another plus point for you.

Some more factors that effect ranking in Baidu is almost same like Google:

• Pay attention to title tags, meta tags, descriptions and keywords, they should be in Chinese if you want to get preference from Baidu.
• Correct usage of H1 and H2 tags, alt tags, and anchor text is required.
• Anchor text for internal linking also matters most, So it must be optimised.
• Make sure your site is index in Baidu, if it's not submit it for indexing in Baidu Trends.
• Well, back link matters, so try increase the link count. But be sure to have relevancy like Google, Baidu also like relevant links.
• Most important shift your hosting to Chinese servers.(And this is the reason I was thinking all the time why you are not getting traffic from Baidu)

 

John, Thank you very much for your feedback!

I want to provide some clarifications along the way:

Yes, Google is much better search engine, i use Google in my daily work and for all English search terms and Baidu sucks in that matter.

For any search related to simplified chinese, Baidu is a King,
Almost every Chinese internet user uses Baidu, and most of the time Google is partly blocked in China and can not open the website you want to open.

My customers are mainly Chinese and i need to target them through Baidu.

Yes, that's important point, which was solved in my previous post.
My hosting is in HK due to complicated procedures to go through if you want to have a hosting in Mainland China.. i.e company registration, numerous documents, etc.

Hosting in HK is much easier.

Yes, i fully agree with this, since i dropped US servers, website launches very quickly.

That's could be a problem, i am not sure how much does it cost to advertise on Baidu.
As far i am aware Baidu does not have so pleasant SEO system with low prices to start with,

I know that one Chinese manufacturer was paying 20 000 RMB monthly to get 1st page on Baidu.

Thanks, that's a great advice, will learn more how to make this right.

 

@Gregory Kowalski Well, hearing good comments is like.... Really appreciated ! But still i would like to know more about Baidu, as you are targeting china, that seems completely different, we use to target only UK and US clients and our main focus is just Google. I would like to learn more about ranking in China as this would be complete different experience. Let me know if something changes for you in future and what major steps you have taken