From site structure and content to backlinks and friend links, a new site needs a solid SEO foundation to rank for keywords. Benshuo Technology shares the key points and trade-offs from its own experience.
Search engines update regularly, and keyword rankings fluctuate at every stage. Even if you do exactly the same things each time, a keyword may suddenly disappear. So always stay prepared and thoughtful — high-quality, natural actions often achieve more with less; summarize such experience yourself.
So, for website optimizers — especially beginners — what SEO foundation should we have for a corporate or similar industry site?
1. The site's own structure
Visitors can tell a good site from a bad one at a glance. User experience matters: content structure, layout, internal-link stickiness, and page load speed are all key.
(1) Choosing hosting. In terms of access speed, domestic hosting usually beats overseas hosting because most domestic servers connect faster; Hong Kong hosting is also common but mostly for unregistered sites. Domestic hosting means faster access and crawling and better overall performance, which helps ranking. But more important than location is a stable, high-quality server that doesn't fail; keep same-IP sites few, avoid placing them with competitors, and especially avoid sharing hosting with spam sites — something Benshuo Technology learned the hard way.
(2) Program and design. Take "brand image design": the corporate sites competing on Baidu's first page use largely similar programs. If you run a new site whose template resembles those, switch the source code soon — nobody wants to see identical-looking sites, and template originality greatly affects ranking. As for design, image-design sites mostly share a similar homepage layout — animation on top, product navigation at lower left, company intro and product display on the right. On compatibility, these sites work fine in Firefox; since pages usually target IE compatibility first, they generally work in other browsers too. Spiders can't detect compatibility, but from a UX standpoint, having it is better than not — though its weight in ranking is small.
2. Site content
Everyone knows spiders prefer original, high-quality content. But Benshuo Technology's corporate site is design-oriented, with many images and little text; content is just "products" and "articles".
(1) Adding products. We name product titles like "Shenzhen Image Design", "Image Design Pricing", "Brand Design Process", but competitors used these long ago. Most corporate sites don't use long-tail words for product titles, instead stacking keywords in the product detail-page titles — which spiders may treat as duplicate pages, though some believe it boosts keyword coverage. It's a debatable point.
(2) Adding articles. Many SEOers don't truly understand "why a company needs brand image design", so they search others' content, copy some, and add their own — that's how "original" articles get pieced together. But we aren't professionals; even a good article only guarantees indexing, and Baidu itself says "original doesn't equal high quality", so original articles have limited effect on corporate-site ranking. Better to write quality content that fits the image-design theme. On topic selection, some sites pick design-related news, others write purely professional pieces; news isn't necessarily bad, but don't write it daily — news relates loosely to your keywords, and writing too much only adds indexing without helping ranking. On anchor text, some point to product detail pages, others to the homepage nav, both aiming to push the homepage up Baidu; there's no hard rule, but in theory don't point everything to the homepage, or it may be seen as cheating.
3. Backlinks
Diversity of backlinks is crucial. "Content is king, links are emperor" runs through all optimization, echoing "even good wine fears a deep alley" — no matter how good the article, if spiders don't index it, it's useless; ranking is built on indexing.
(1) Backlinks must be broad — not only on forums or one fixed B2B platform, or even many links won't help much. Spread them across various forums, B2B platforms, blogs and Baidu products, and weight will rise faster.
(2) Yet observing competitors, their backlinks are only a few hundred to a thousand-odd — not many — and they still rank ahead. Clearly backlinks no longer have the decisive effect on ranking they once did.
4. Friend links
Friend links can directly boost ranking; high-weight friend links pull your own weight up directly. Unfortunately Baidu has regulated one-way links, weakening the effect.
(1) We all want to exchange links with better sites, but usually can only swap with peers — high-weight sites won't easily exchange with low-traffic ones. So swap with peers first, and if a better one is willing, all the better.
(2) The traditional way is swapping via QQ groups, but that suits only the short term since group members are fairly fixed and joining new groups gets harder. Better to use friend-link or webmaster platforms — most SEO-savvy people post links there; log in, search related sites, add their QQ, and they usually agree, making swaps easy. Still, those first-page sites with weight 2 often don't have many friend links, and not all are high-weight, showing that while friend links directly boost ranking, their effect is limited. Once a site reaches the first page, swapping with even better sites makes the ranking more stable.
Finally, Benshuo Technology sums up: many factors affect ranking, roughly in this order of importance — template, content, hosting, backlinks, friend links. Only by doing better than competitors in every area will rankings keep improving. The above is a fairly basic, natural approach; we'll leave finer details for another time — welcome to leave a comment on the Benshuo Technology blog!