Of course you can understand the economic value of opening your business up to the Chinese market. But did you know it could be so easy?

Getting your website online in the Chinese market literally takes only a few minutes. Although Baidu does not guarantee inclusion after your submission, it is such an easy process and has worked easily in the past.

First You Need One Chinese Language Web Page

Submitting a website in the Chinese search engine Baidu requires at least one Chinese page.

The best bet is to create a new page or blog post that is a translation of your product descriptions or of the services that you offer.

How do you do this?

Go to the Google English to Chinese translation page. You can find this by replacing the 'www' with 'translate' in the Google web address. Select English to Chinese, paste in your text and hit enter.

The text is instantly translated and you have a Chinese document to work with. For a more complete submission you may want to translate into both the traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese languages.

Like your English language website you must format the document using all standard SEO practices. Include a page title, keywords and emphasize your keywords in bold or italics, and include keywords in your headings.

Do these translations with the Google translation tool. You should find that making a page in Chinese not much more difficult than an English language page.

Submitting your Website to Baidu

All you need is one single web page in each of the two Chinese languages, if you are doing both the traditional and simplified Chinese translations. The page needs to be live on your website.

Once your Chinese pages are ready and live on your website you can submit those pages to Baidu.

Go to http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html

After the page loads, enter your URL and the "cpatcha" code to prove you are human.

This page can load slowly on occasion.

Baidu emphasizes that their search engine will automatically include websites submitted if it is in compliance with the relevant Baidu standards - but remember inclusion is not guaranteed.

That is it. The process of submitting your website to the leading Chinese search engine is as simple as that.

Chinese Searches Will Continue To Grow

After looking at just how simple registering your website with the leading Chinese directory was, let's look at the sheer economic value this small procedure could have on your business:

• China is the world's most populated country, with nearly 1.4 Billion people.
• Only 10% of the population uses the internet.
• Only 162 million Chinese are internet users
• This leaves 1.3 billion potential future clients.
• When China gets to the worldwide average for internet penetration of 20% they will have passed the number of Americans. Not American internet users, but the total number of Americans.
• When the Chinese hit the European average for internet penetration they will have more users than Europe and North America combined.
• It is estimated that by 2010 China will pass the United States as the biggest internet community online.

With the Olympics in China during August 2008, what better time to make your website available to the Chinese market.