How do I submit my website to the Baidu search engine?

Posted by By Dan Taylor 3 Min Read

Submitting your website to Baidu, China’s leading search engine, involves a series of steps to ensure proper indexing and optimization. Follow this detailed guide to navigate the process effectively.

Create a Baidu Account

To begin, you need to create a Baidu account. Visit Baidu Webmaster Tools and sign up by clicking on the sign-up button. You’ll need a valid Chinese phone number for verification. Once your account is created, log in to Baidu Webmaster Tools to proceed with the next steps.

Verify Your Website

Next, you must verify ownership of your website. Click on the “Add Site” button to submit your website. Baidu offers several verification methods:

  • File Verification: Download a verification file from Baidu and upload it to the root directory of your website.
  • Meta Tag Verification: Add a meta tag provided by Baidu to your website’s homepage.
  • DNS Verification: Add a DNS record as specified by Baidu.

Submit Your Sitemap

After verifying your website, create a sitemap, preferably in XML format. Navigate to the sitemap section in Baidu Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap URL. This submission helps Baidu index your pages more efficiently.

Optimize for Baidu

Optimizing your website for Baidu is crucial for better visibility and ranking. Ensure your website content is high-quality, relevant, and updated regularly.

Use meta tags appropriately, including meta keywords, as Baidu still considers them. Additionally, make sure your website is mobile-friendly since Baidu prioritizes mobile-optimized sites. Finally, optimize your website’s loading speed to enhance performance on Baidu.

Monitor and Improve

Monitoring and improving your website’s performance is an ongoing process. Use Baidu Webmaster Tools to check the indexing status of your website and identify any issues.

Regularly monitor your website’s performance, traffic, and rankings using the analytics tools provided by Baidu. Based on the data and insights gathered, continuously optimize your website to achieve better performance and higher rankings on Baidu.

By following these steps, you can successfully submit your website to Baidu and improve its visibility in the Chinese market.

Regular monitoring and optimization are essential to maintaining a strong presence on Baidu, ensuring your website reaches its full potential in this important market.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor