Hi there,
my company is going to extend its activities in China.
In order to do so, we will create a website in Chinese (Mandarin). Because I don't speak Chinese and because I am not familiar with issues that could occur because the website has not been properly prepared for the Chinese market (in terms of
SEO, etc.), I have a few questions to submit, I hope some of you already have been confronted with these problems before and can give me some advice...
1/ We are about to host our new website in Hong Kong for accessiblity reasons. The provider we have selected claims that there is a good speed between HK and China (most of the Chinese websites I visit from home (France) are very slow, and websites out of China are very slow when visited from China). Is that connection speed related to the host, the country where the site is hosted...?
2/ I am not sure how the website should be encoded. UTF-8 seems to be the best option. What about GB2312? How does-it impact on Search Engine ranking?
3/ Speaking about search engines, does anyone know what the most used search engines are? Baidu? Any info about how these search engines work (compared to Google...)?
4/ Last but not least, a "marketing" company registered our-company-name.cn the day before we did it (probably one of the hosting companies we contacted). So now we're stuck with our-company-name.com.cn
Does anybody know what the law about domain names is in China? Is it possible to claim the domain name? (our company name is very specific)
I'll try to keep looking for info in the next days, I'll post my findings here, if in the meantime someone has some ideas and suggestions...
cheers.
effisk.