www.Hao123.com

Baidu’s Hao123.com is China’s largest Chinese web directory / navigational site.

What is Hao123.com?

Hao123.com was launched in 1999 and was acquired by Chinese search engine Baidu.com in 2004.

For Chinese internet users, Hao123 is an Internet “start page” that shows paid and non-paid links on the home page and category pages. Hao123’s homepage consists of over 200 outbound links that are pointing to other popular Chinese websites. Categorized pages consist of outbound links to websites with specific topics including:

Weather: www.hao123.com/tianqi.htm
Maps: www.hao123.com/jiatong.htm
Shopping: www.hao123.com/netbuy.htm
Stock market: www.hao123.com/stock.htm
Properties: www.hao123.com/hbzs.htm
Automobiles: www.hao123.com/car.htm
Health: www.hao123.com/ylbj.htm
Jobs: www.hao123.com/rencai.htm
Travel: www.hao123.com/liyou.htm

My Hao123 Personalized Page

To improve users’ experience, Hao123.com offers this “wide screen” version of the directory site and personalized homepage, My Hao123 which is similar to iGoogle. To use My Hao123, sign up for a Baidu login. You can select your background image and add up to 10 customized URLs which will appear on your personal My Hao123 page:

Submit Sites to Hao123.com

An alternative to advertising on Baidu through Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest is to submit your sites to Hao123’s directory listings.

Baidu has an editorial team ensuring the listing quality and managing site submissions to Hao123.com, so depending on the quality and popularity of your sites in China, you websites may or may not be included.

Inclusion may be difficult for Chinese sites that do not already have high traffic volume or are not yet big brand names. Alternatively, submit your site to Baidu to receive organic search engine traffic.

Hao123’s Legitimacy

Hao123 is one of Baidu’s largest search traffic providers and has the highest web traffic among all the Chinese web directory sites. This caused Chinese webmasters to create fake Hao123 sites, including:

www.hao123.cn
www.hao123.com.cn
www.hao123.net.cn
www.hao123.cc

However, Baidu officially announced that besides www.hao123.com, below are also legitimate Hao123 domains:

www.hao123.net
www.hao222.com
www.hao222.net

Posted on March 8, 2010
Category: Hao123 | 1 Comment

Google SEO Report Card

Google ran search engine optimization audit on its own websites/products and compiled a report – Google’s SEO Report Card. From the SEO Report Card, Google’s search engine optimization audit can be categorized in three major SEO subjects:

Search Result Presentation: Title tag formats and lengths, description meta tag use, Google sitelink triggering and effectiveness, and main page result clearness on Google
URLs and Redirects: Directory forms, subdomain forms, 301s, canonicalization
On-page Optimizations: Heading tag use, H1 tag use, logo image link destination, logo image alt text, and descriptive internal anchor text

The 100 Google’s websites/products that have gone through the rating process in the SEO Report Card, include:

Advertising and publishing systems: Google Adwords and Google Adsense
Users’ search trend tools: Google Insights for Search, Google Trends
Blogging / feed management tools: Blogger and Feedburner
Personal profile: Profiles
Site search features: Google Site Search and Google Custom Search Engines
Product Tools: Google Store and Google Products
Other tools / services: Picasa Web Albums, Google Finance, Map Maker, Fast Flip, Knol and more

Download (*.pdf) Google’s SEO Report Card.

Webmasters should use Google’s SEO Report Card and Google SEO for beginners as guidelines to run SEO audits on web sites.

Posted on March 5, 2010
Category: Google SEO | Leave a Comment

Microsoft AdCenter Desktop

The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal will soon allow Bing/Yahoo to become the search engine with the second largest global search traffic, with Yahoo Search Marketing / Bing AdCenter advertisers managing the PPC search engine campaigns through Microsoft’s AdCenter paid search system.

Microsoft AdCenter Desktop is a free desktop application/tool provided by Microsoft/MSN for managing your Bing/AdCenter search campaigns.

Using Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Tool

To use Microsoft Adcenter Desktop Tool, download it from the official Microsoft Adcenter website and start managing your Bing Adcenter campaigns. With Microsoft AdCenter Desktop, you can:

Manage your AdCenter accounts in bulk (e.g. make changes to thousands of keywords at once), from the campaign level down to the individual ad/keyword level.
Create/edit campaigns offline and then publish changes later when you are online.
Get performance alerts through Microsoft AdCenter Desktop. Make changes to your budgets/campaigns/ad groups/ads/keywords according to automatic alerts that notify you about key performance behaviors and status changes.
Discover new keywords through Microsoft AdCenter Desktop and add the new keywords to your AdCenter account using the keyword research tools.
Get official Microsoft resources for using AdCenter Desktop via AdCenter Desktop’s Help, AdCenter Desktop’s Forum and Microsoft Advertising’s Learning Center on AdCenter Desktop.
Receive AdCenter’s new feature updates.

Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Took Review by Other PPC Experts

PPC Hero reviewed the use of Microsoft AdCenter Desktop Tool and believes:

Your entire AdCenter account will be downloaded when exporting. So when you have an extremely large amount, each download may take a long time.
AdCenter Desktop provides multiple account views and you can edit multiple rows at once including changes to CPC, status, or match type.
Your AdCenter Desktop CSV import file can’t be exceed 10,000 rows and the layout is very important.

Posted on March 2, 2010
Category: Adcenter | Leave a Comment

Baidu Advertising

Baidu is the number one Chinese search engine in China. Advertising on Baidu allows your business/brand to reach the China market and be found by Chinese consumers. Your search engine marketing/optimization plans on Baidu should include:

Baidu Phoenix Nest

Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest is a PPC (paid search) system that was first launched in April 2009 as a beta program. Through Phoenix Nest’s PPC auction system, ads are displayed above of and/or alongside Baidu’s organic search engine results pages, and ads are ranked by keywords’ click-through-rates (CTR) and maximum cost-per-click (CPC).

Baidu’s Phoenix Nest system was officially launched in full after Baidu retired the old PPC system in December 2009.

PPC keyword ads (like Baidu Phoenix Nest ads) require advertisers to have experience in optimizing paid search campaigns, before good ROI can be achieved.

Baidu Brand Link Ads

Baidu brand link ads for trademark keywords are for advertisers focusing on “branding” by maximizing their brands’ ad spaces on Baidu’s search engine results pages.

Baidu Search Open Platform

Baidu Search Open Platform is the onebox results / universal search results that may appear in Baidu’s organic search results pages. Suggest website content for inclusion by submitting URLs or XML files through your Baidu Search Open Platform account.

However, Baidu gives few guidelines to what relevant content will be accepted and displayed in Baidu’s organic search results. So you should not expect all your submissions to be included in Baidu’s organic search results.

Other Baidu Marketing Channel(s) on Baidu’s SERP

Baidu Huobao text ads used to be a convenient ad type that do not require advertisers to optimize their ads regularly. However, Baidu Huobao text ads are believed to have stopped accepting new advertisers and are phasing out due to Baidu Phoenix Nest’s full launch.

Baidu Organic Search Traffic

Submit your site to Baidu. Increase your Chinese web site’s Baidu organic search traffic by improving your website’s Baidu organic search ranking through search engine optimization (SEO).

Baidu’s Web Analytics and Keyword Research Tools

Baidu’s keyword research tool is a “must use” keyword tool for Baidu Phoenix Nest and Baidu search engine optimization (SEO).

Baidu Analytics allows you to track your Chinese website’s traffic numbers.

Posted on February 22, 2010
Category: Baidu PPC | Leave a Comment

Twitter vs Google Buzz Microblogging

Google Buzz microblogging is new, but Google Buzz may be the killer microblogging tool to Twitter.

Twitter is a single feature tool which may be too simple.
Friendfeed may be too complicated to new users on social microblogging.
Google Buzz may have just enough features to become the right microblogging tool.

Twitter vs Google Buzz (Pros’ Comparisons)

Twitter’s Pros:

Twitter has built an early lead with an estimated 75 million user base, most of those are technology and media savvy influencers.
Twitter.com is simple and easy to use, and is a single-purpose site.
Twitter’s key feature is to allow retweet with one click.
Twitter has plugins connecting to social networking sites including Facebook and LinkedIn, and blogging platforms like Wordpress blogs.
Bing search engine has a vertical search channel, Bing Twitter, that ranks Twitter’s Tweets.

Google Buzz’s Pros:

Google Buzz started with an estimated 100 million active Gmail users. If Google can quickly convert Gmail users and Google’s web search users to Google Buzz’s user base, Google will be able to monetize through Adsense / advertising.
Google Buzz is a light version of Friendfeed, but offers more features than Twitter (Google Buzz for Beginners). Google has a talent pool of engineers who will continue improving and integrating Buzz with Google web search, Chrome, and mobile devices.
Google Buzz has no characters limitation on any Buzz posts.
Google Buzz allows geo-location microblogging.
Google is the search engine that sets the algorithm on how microblogging messages like Buzz/Tweets/Re-Buzz/Retweets are ranked in the search engine results pages.

Twitter vs Google Buzz (Cons’ Comparisons)

Twitter’s Cons:

Twitter allows a maximum of 140 characters per tweet (or post).
Twitter’s simple features may have led Twitter to become a status update tool or a commodity, as most Twitter users are only posting “status updates”.
Twitter’s easy-to-use features can easily be replicated.
Twitter has started to show slower user growth rates. Large portion of Twitter users are inactive.

Google Buzz’s Cons:

Google Buzz is a similar to Google Wave which was previously launched by Google and is a confusing tool/service to Google Buzz.
Google hasn’t had real success developing any killer online social tools including Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google Wave.
Google Buzz is not integrated with Facebook.
It takes more than 1 click to “re-buzz” someone’s Google Buzz post.
Google may run into privacy issues by revealing too much user personal information, including showing users’ geo-locations

Posted on February 18, 2010
Category: Microblogging | 3 Comments

Google Buzz for Beginners

Google Buzz Microblogging has recently become available to Gmail users. This beginners’ guide offers tips to microblog through Google Buzz:

Google Buzz “How-to” Microblog Tips

Fast Company’s How to Do Everything in Google Buzz offers tips to:

Connect other services/sites to Google Buzz
Post Buzz to only certain selected people
Get the permalink of a specific Buzz
Send Buzz via @ replies
Silence frequently updated Buzz posts and turn off Google Buzz
Use Google Buzz through your Andriod or iPhone devices

AEXT.net provides 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz to:

Format your Buzz’s texts (i.e. bold, italic, bold underline, etc)
Post to Buzz@gmail.com from SMS
Hide/Remove Google Buzz updates from your Gmail
Turn off Google Buzz
Indicate and notify the commenter you’re replying to
Access Buzz before it is enabled for your account
Re-Buzz
Show your geo-locations
Install Buzz extension for Firefox
Set up Buzz extensions for Google Chrome
Search on Buzz
Add “Buzz it” widget to your blog

ReadWriteWeb offers 5 Google Buzz Tips for the Advanced User to:

Get Buzz browser extensions
Hide your Buzz contact list (followers and followings) from public view
Update Buzz via email
Subscribe to someone’s Buzz via RSS
Email, link to, or mute a Buzz post

Push Google’s Buzz to Twitter’s Tweets

How To Bring Your Google Buzz Entries to Twitter from Louis Gray’s Silicon Valley’s Blog offers a way to share items from Google Buzz to Twitter in real time.

Google Buzz for Wordpress Blogs

Tricks Daddy shows you how to:

Manually add “Buzz this” Button to your Wordpress blog
Add “Buzz this” Button using Google Buzz Wordpress Plugin

Too Much Google Buzz Microblogging?

If the amount of Buzz microblogged information becomes overwhelmed and starts to annoy you, hide your Google Buzz update count and icon in Gmail, and hide/remove Google Buzz Updates from your Gmail inbox.

Blogoscoped has given 5 Reasons Why Gmail Buzz Privacy Isn’t All That Bad.

However, if Google Buzz is really not a tool for you and you worry about personal information privacy issues, Jessica Dolcourt’s Buzz off: Disabling Google Buzz provides a 3-step procedure to turn off Google Buzz completely:

Purge your profile
Block your followers
Disable Buzz in Gmail

Posted on February 13, 2010
Category: Microblogging | Leave a Comment

Google Buzz Microblogging

Google launched a new micro-blogging or sharing tool, Google Buzz. Google buzz is built right into Google’s Gmail and allows you to social network and microblog in real-time.

Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos and more, and start conversations about the things you find interesting.

Google Buzz is a similar tool to Friendfeed and Twitter.

Start Using Google Buzz

To set up Google Buzz, go to www.google.com/buzz.

Once you have signed-in with your Gmail account / Google account, you are automatically following the people you have previously emailed and/or mostly chatted with through Gmail.
You can choose to “unfollow” anyone at any time.
Create/update your personal information through Google Profiles which will become your “online social profile”.

Start using Google Buzz now.

Upside of Google Buzz

Google Buzz lets you microblog in Gmail environment and allows you to:

Follow, and/or be followed
Publish your status updates (posts) to your friends and receive comments right to your Gmail inbox in real-time.
Post messages in private or public.
Share links, photos, and videos.
Import items from Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, and Google Reader.
Keep your social networking friends’ conversations in one place.
Automatically weed out useless short messages.
Do all the above microblogging and sharing from your Andriods or iPhones.

Google Buzz also automatically recommends interesting messages and filters out useless/meaningless messages that you are likely to skip.

Downside of Google Buzz

Google Buzz is built-in to Gmail, so you can manage all your online social activities and microblogging in your Gmail account. The possible issues for Google Buzz to grow the user base:

It may take time for current active Gmail users to actively microblog through Google Buzz.
It may take even longer for non-Gmail users to start with Gmail, and then follow you and be followed by you on Google Buzz.

Google Buzz has not yet fully connected to the world’s largest social networking site Facebook or the most popular micro-blogging service Twitter.

Google Buzz has not yet able to import or export items from Facebook.
When you post on Google Buzz, your message will not be appear on your Twitter’s Tweets.

Other Google Social Tools

Last year, Google Wave went live, which is a social tool that allows live co-operations in document editing, project idea brainstorming, and file sharing.

Google Friend Connect was also made available to all websites which allows webmasters to build up the “fan” base for their sites.

Posted on February 11, 2010
Category: Microblogging | 1 Comment

Optimize Landing Pages

A landing page is an active web page where potential customers directly land on when they click your PPC (pay-per-click) ad. High quality landing pages help improving your PPC conversion rate, and hence reducing your overall PPC cost. Landing page optimization is one of the major factors in Google Adwords PPC optimization.

Google Adwords Landing Page Quality Score

Besides Google Adwords Quality Score, Google Adwords algorithm assigns a landing page quality score to each of your PPC landing page (destination URL) in your Adwords account.

Google determines landing page quality score by evaluating both the destination URLs of both your ad and your keyword. Each of your keyword’s landing page quality score is visible in your Adwords account. The landing page quality score is based on the average quality of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain.

High Quality Landing Page and Low Quality Landing Page

Google explains what may have caused low quality score to landing pages and offers guidelines to create high quality landing pages.

Your landing page quality score will be negatively affected, when your Adwords account grades your landing page “This page isn’t highly relevant”.
Your Quality Score will not be affected, or in some cases will be positively affected, if when your Adwords account grades your landing page “No problems found”.

PPC Landing Page Load Time

Google also evaluates PPC landing page load time when determining Adwords landing page quality score and offers tips to improve the load times of your landing pages.

Tips from Other PPC Experts on Landing Page Optimization

PPC Hero believes an optimized Adwords landing page must have:

Call-to-action
Minimal navigation
Important information above-the-fold
Easy-to-scan copy
Few images to convey professionalism
Fast loading time
Dynamic headlines, with tips to automatically generate dynamic headlines on your landing pages
PPC keywords in your landing page copy
Short contact form
No clutter

Best practices of PPC landing page optimization from others:

7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization – Optimize and Prophesize’s Jonathan Mendez
PPC Landing Page Do’s and Don’ts – Milestones Internet
Creating Effective Landing Pages – Taming the Beast’s Michael Bloch
Large Red Buttons – Grokdotdom’s Josh Hay

Identify Bad Landing Pages, Improve Conversion Rates

The metrics that can indicate your PPC landing page’s effectiveness are Web analytics bounce rate and Conversion rate. High bounce rate and high abandonment mean your landing page consists of problems and your website’s conversion rate is therefore negatively affected. To identify problems and improve your landing pages,

Monitor traffic of your PPC landing pages and your site with Google Analytics. Evaluate the values of your landing pages relative to other web pages of your site against conversions.
Run A/B testing and/or multi-variate testing through Google’s Website Optimizer and optimize your landing pages’ content and design.

The ultimate goal of landing page optimization is to improve your web site’s conversion rate.

Posted on February 7, 2010
Category: Landing Page Optimization | 1 Comment

Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Google offers dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), an advanced Adwords feature to help advertisers automate ad text creation. Adwords dynamic keyword insertion allows you to minimize the time you spend manually creating and managing your ad groups, while targeting users with effective and relevant ads.

Adwords advertisers with large number of products can use dynamic keyword insertion to manage:

General ad groups with generic ads for closely related products
Specific individual ad groups and ads for each of those products

Using Google Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Normally, you want to show your keyword within the first line of your ad text. To use keyword insertion, place the following piece of code into your ad text:

{keyword:default text}

The keyword that triggers the ad will replace the code each time the ad appears. Dynamic keyword insertion works for ads that are triggered by Adwords broad match keywords or phrase match keywords that are different to the actual search queries.

Advanced Use of Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion

The use of Adwords dynamic keyword insertion code is not limited to one convention. For example, the keyword that triggers your ad is “cheap blue widget”. Use different formats of dynamic keyword insertion code to show your ad text in different capitalization:

{keyword:default text} = cheap blue widget
{Keyword:default text} = Cheap blue widget
{KeyWord:default text} = Cheap Blue Widget
{KEYWORD:default text} = CHEAP BLUE WIDGET
{KEYWord:default text} = CHEAP Blue Widget
{KeyWORD:default text} = Cheap Blue WIDGET

When Not to Use Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion

You should not use dynamic keyword insertion in ads that may be triggered by:

Keywords that are misspelled or ungrammatical phrases
Keywords that have non-standard abbreviations or unusual spacing

Avoid pitfalls and common mistakes when using Adwords dynamic keyword insertion, and apply professional PPC ad copy writing.

How Does Dynamic Keyword Insertion Affect Google Adwords Quality Score?

Using Adwords dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) does not directly improve your Google Adwords Quality Score. However if used properly, dynamic keyword insertion can help to improve your text ads’ click-through-rate (CTR) by making your ads more specific to users’ search queries. When CTR improves, your quality score also improves.

Posted on February 1, 2010
Category: Adwords Tips | 2 Comments

Submit Site to Baidu

Baidu.com is the largest Chinese search engine in China. To ensure your new Chinese website receives organic search traffic from Baidu.com, submit your website to through Baidu’s official URL submission page.

Besides your website’s URL, you will have to enter a randomly generated captcha passcode when submitting through Baidu’s URL submission page. However, Baidu’s URL submission page is simple and it won’t require you to understand any Chinese characters.

Go to Baidu.com and check your website with the “Site:” command after about one month:

site:your-site.com

To speed up your site’s inclusion in Baidu’s index, ensure your site’s content in written in Chinese (Simplified). Alternatively, get a link from a Chinese (Simplified) web site that is already indexed in Baidu to point to your new Chinese website.

Unlike Google, Yahoo or Bing, Baidu currently offers no official search engine webmaster tools and no URL submission through sitemap in XML format.

Posted on January 24, 2010
Category: Baidu SEO | 5 Comments

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