Bysoft China's Blog > Your Resource To Keep Up With the Web!

Google Analytics and Baidu Tongji are 2 website traffic analysis services, designed for website administrators. From the functionality point of view, both Google Analytics and Baidu Tongji share the following characteristics: they are not only a counter of recording traffics and clicks, but more importantly, they provide a series of tools to help website administrators to track, measure and analyze the traffics and user behavior. They can tell the website administrator how visitors find his website, how they navigate on the website, and what they do on the website. With this information, the administrator can easily translate them into information valuable to the online marketing and the management, and can give them guidance on improving the website’s usability.

What’s better about Google Analytics than Baidu Tongji

• Google Analytics offers very powerful cross data analysis functions. Almost every dimension available can be used for cross data analysis upon another dimension. In Baidu Tongji, there are not a big number of comparable dimensions (only Localization and Source are present in most of the reports).
• Advanced segmentation functions are provided in Google Analytics, allowing the user to easily create detailed and customized segmentation of the data he wishes to see. This is extremely useful for website with multiple languages, or has specific visitor segmentations.
• Google Analytics offers many ways of creating a customized report, using nearly every dimension available in the system. The user can choose among dimensions such as Source, Localization, Ads Series, Medium, to create customized reports, only base on information that interests him the most.
• The localization defined by Google Analytics is much larger than Baidu Tongji. In Google Analytics, we have localization information for almost every country in the world, allowing user to segment by countries. But in Baidu Tongji, the localization has only China (can be detailed in provinces) and foreign areas. There is no segmenting to other countries.
• Deploying Google Analytics is more reliable. Lots of website building systems provide Google Analytics installation functionality. We can install Google Analytics to the whole website by only adding the account information to the system. Baidu Tongji provides an auto-installation service, but it changes every file on the website through FTP, which may cause stability problem for the website.

Compared with Google Analytics, in what Baidu Tongji excels?

• Created by Chinese, Baidu Tongji provides a very detailed segmentation on the Chinese localizations: you can choose to segment your visits by province, to analyze the visits coming from different regions within China.
• Baidu Tongji offers databases useful to Chinese website administrators, such as an IP base for Chinese cities, the statistics based on the most used browsers or ISPs in China.
• To support the complex and powerful analytics functionalities, Google Analytics has a longer time delay on the received data (we cannot see data within the past 1 or 2 hours). But Baidu Tongji provides data with a shorter time delay, allowing the user to monitor almost in real time events occurring on the website.

Baidu Tongji offers micro view of website visitors’ activities: for example, we can see the last 500 visit records of the latest visitors, or the detailed visit track of a certain user. Google Analytics tends to provide a macro view, without any information on the micro statistics.

1. Baidu and Google are companies from different countries. Baidu is the largest search engine company in China while Google is an American company and is the largest search engine company in the world. Of course, the number of Google users is the highest in the world. But in China, the supremacy of Baidu is unshakable.

2. The different target audiences. Baidu’s main target audience is China, whereas Google’s target audience is the whole world. This is very obvious on Baidu advertising and Google Adwords. For Baidu advertising, we can choose the China provinces as the promotion area for every campaign, but we cannot choose any specific foreign country. But on Google Adwords, we can choose any countries as our promotion area. This well reflects that the focus of Baidu is Chinese market, while Google focuses on the entire world.

3. Language difference. Most of the information or content on Baidu is in Chinese. Google aims to provide service to the entire world and provides translation of its services into other languages for those who cannot read English.

4. Different advertising costs. Compared with Google’s keyword per click costs, Baidu’s one is lower. In the Baidu advertising dashboard, we can choose daily, weekly or monthly budget. But for Google, we just can choose daily budget.

5. Different extensional services. Baidu supports many extensional services for adapting to Chinese users’ habits, such as Baidu Baike, Baidu tieba, Baidu Zhidao and so on. All of these services are Baidu’s special products. Google’s extensional services usually work for the customers in the whole world, not only for Chinese people.

6. Different SEO. Google and Baidu SEO are very different for either keyword ranking algorithm, or website content or external links. Even if your Baidu SEO is pretty good, that does not mean that the Google SEO is also good.

To summarize, if the company’s target audience is Chinese people, Baidu is necessary; if the target audience is foreigners, Google is better. However for most of the companies in China, a mix of both is the best choice.

• 1. Do not install the Joomla sample database

Do not install the sample database when you install Joomla, because these examples usually are not related to the theme of your website. If you have installed it, we suggest you to delete it and empty the recycle bin; otherwise it will contain duplicated data that is largely used by other sites, and this is not conductive to SEO.

• 2. Your site name should be your domain

Some people like to fill in the Site Name with many keywords. In fact, this would not help you much. When users register on your site, they will receive an email saying” welcome to software   download database web source” which seems not very clear and also it is not your wish.

• 3 Disable PDF links

The rank value of PDF files is usually higher than that of the average webpage. Because Google considers that the PDF files are filtered, collated and the content value is higher than ordinary webpage. However there is no menu in the PDF links page generated by Joomla. When users access to this page through search engine, they are unable to visit others pages of the website. Therefore you should disable this feature.

• 4. Do not put too many social bookmarking links on the page

Users like the clean pages and so does search engine. Therefore we suggest you to put social bookmarking links in the valuable content pages, rather than leave around everywhere.

• 5. Redirect www and non www domain name to the same page

It is very simple. Add the following code to .htaccess file and pay attention to replace MyDomain.com with your own domain name

## Can be commented out if causes errors.
Options FollowSymLinks
# mod_rewrite in use

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MyDomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.*MyDomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• 6. Open the website cache

Search engines like to visit the fast speed website, open this option, and make your site the better performance.

• 7.Fill in the complete description for each section and category.

It can help to improve the site’s page rank and optimize search engine visit.

• 8. Simple is beautiful

Thousands of pages indexed by Google is not a good thing, especially some of  the pages have little value content .Google usually does not like it. Some of Joomla’s components will generate a lot of pages and some of them are useless for the website. You should enter site:mydomain.com in Google for checking. If the indexed pages contain no significant value, you can remove them from Joomla.

• 9. Fill in metadata in Joomla’s Global Settings page

Complete the installation of Joomla, the default metadata is “Joomla! – The dynamic portal engine and content management system”. If you do not want it as the description of your site, change it.

• 10.Confidence

Joomla designer takes into account the SEO problems. It is a great CMS and you should learn how Joomla works. You’ll find your site have a higher search rankings soon.

In the current top ad placement formula, Google just consider your Quality Score and your actual CPC, which is determined in part by the bids of advertisers below you. Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in the top position. Read more »