English Taiwan : The websphere, the blogosphere, traffic, SEO and the need for a profound change

What is the readerbase potential for Taiwan blogs? is anybody really interested in English Taiwan websites? Using Alexa’s problematic traffic ratings, I’ll quickly discuss the Taiwanese English websphere, blogosphere and the its potential.

What are the biggest English Taiwan websites and just how big is their traffic? I compared a few of the active Taiwan communities I know and this are the results:

Aside from taiwanfun.com, which also has a Chinese readerbase, all the Taiwan sites, even the ones that are considered big – like forumosa.com, are ranked very low and get very little traffic (not in top 100,000 sites). In the Taipei Times’ article on expat websites in Taiwan – Forumosa’s owners shared details about Taiwanted.com :

"Last month averaged 3,000 daily page views and has doubled its traffic and advertising content in two months". 

3,000 pageviews is not good performance, especially for a site supported by a previous site and the forumosa.com fame.

How about Taiwan blogs? following Taiwan blogs for over a year and a half, I tried comparing the popular ones I know, but most were too low to even get noticed by Alexa. Here are some of the leading ones (David’s, Michael’s):

Absolute rankings : Forumosa.com (357,315), David’s (374,461), Michael’s (445,042).

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Why is this happening? is it because no one’s interested in Taiwan? Is the expat community not big enough? I’m not sure. Personally, I would like to believe that’s not the case, and Google Trends and other keyword analysis tools show that people are looking for English information about Taiwan. Problem is, they just can’t find it. I know this to be true from when I first looked up Taiwan – I just couldn’t find quality information about Taiwan since it was hidden away at the bottom of search engine results. In today’s online world, search engine placement is everything.

Trying to look at it from an SEO perspective, English Taiwan sites are not performing well, with very low Google PR and the worst imaginable Google rankings on important Taiwan keywords. When it comes to backlinks Forumosa has PageRank 2 (PR2), Taiwanfun – owned by search-engine optimizers – is PR2, Taiwaned.com is PR3. Most Taiwan blogs are written under blogspot and typepad, with the out-of-the-box templates and using subdomains they have little control over. Taiwan blogs and websites do very little website optimization and link promotion, which results in little exposure.

If the English Taiwan blogsphere is to get anywhere, there’s need for a change. Things you can do :

• Get a decent domain with your own hosting and start running your own blog. There is work involved, but you’ll notice the results within less than 3 months.
• Optimize your websites and blogs for search engines. Search the Internet for valuable information about SEO and implement it – clean and meaningful urls, right page-titles, metatags and headings usage, sitemaps submission, robots.txt and .htaccess optimization to avoid content duplication etc. etc. Don’t know how? email me and I’ll try and do a quick analysis of your blog/site and post it on fiLi’s tech.
• Sharing link love – linking is extremely important. Use internal links with good keywords, ask people to link to you using quality keywords, get links to your site from higher PR sites that are outside the blogosphere (directories, forums, etc.).

A few months ago I suggested those improvements to a number of online friends (David on Formosa being one of them), and although it’s only been a few months and there’s still work to be done – I think the results are fantastic.

Conclusion – things are looking pretty bad for Taiwan’s English websphere and blogosphere but there is something that can be done about it. It’s all up to us.