One of the major issues tackled by SEO is accessibility. We want to make sure that a website  that’s being optimised is accessible not just by search engine spiders but also by users regardless of their connection speed, browser used, etc. A thing overlooked by many SEOs though is checking whether the website is accessible from all parts of the world, particularly China. This oversight is understandable since the internet is afterall borderless and unless the website caters specifically to a Chinese audience the “China problem” is easy to overlook. A common, yet potentially costly mistake.

China Internet Market

Early last year the Wall Street Journal reported that China was closing in on US as the largest web market. By the year’s end it has indeed succeeded in topping the US in terms of number of internet users. According to Internet World Stats US had 220,141,969 users while China had 253,000,000 users last 2008.  Now while that alone should make any SEO look up and not take the China market for granted if you also consider that fact that the 253 million Chinese users make up only 19% of the total Chinese population then you can bet that it’s sheer stupidity not to make sure that your website is accessible in China.

The Great Firewall of China

Now for those who haven’t heard of the Great Firewall of China (officially called the Golden Shield Project) this is the reason why your website might have accessibility problems in China. The firewall system actually reroutes everything and uses proxy servers to allow websites, with content acceptable to the government, to be viewed by internet users. Now although most websites are not blocked (and thank goodness Phoenixrealm definitely isn’t ^_^) it is still best to check whether your website is accessible in China. Chances are as long you do not put any controversial content on your site that it is and will be accessible. Note though that China’s firewall system is not that consistent and resulting in websites being accessible in one city and not in another so when you do check your site’s accessiblity be thorough and check the accessibilty in major cities.

The great thing about internet users is that browsing/surfing behaviors evolve rapidly as they learn to do things the more efficient way. One of the things that users now depend heavily on is the search box. Search is no longer confined to Google and more and more websites now offer internal search to make it easier for users to find specific info found somewhere on the site. This is good practice especially from the user interface point of view. However, when it comes to SEO the search box can become a liability.

How is this so?

To be more accurate, the search box itself is not the problem. The presence of a search box on the site will NOT affect your SEO efforts negatively. However, relying too much on the search box to help your users navigate through the website and not paying attention to the link architecture of the site is a sure way to ensure that your site will not be optimised for crawling.

The main thing that is overlooked due to over reliance on the search box is deep linking. Deep linking is a no no for SEO. Avoiding deep linking simply means making sure that ALL pages are accessible and are only a few clicks (preferrably not more than three) from the main page. The reason behind this is that spiders, as we all know, discover the pages in your website by following links. Spiders do not always crawl all the links and the “deeper” (more clicks away from the main page) the page is the chances that the spider will overlook it increases.

So if you want to use a search box by all means do so but always remember that search engine spiders use a different way to crawl your website, and  make sure to pave the way for spiders to do their crawling without any snags.