Social SEO Guide

I have been posed this question as of late, both with my hosting company, and with the Social SEO Guide. The question, paraphrased, is along the lines of: How do I get my website or blog to rank high for certain countries search engines? This is a very good question, and the answers are quite simple.

The first method we will look at is the ccTLD (TLD = Top Level Domain & cc = country code). One of the items the search engine robots looks for is the ccTLD. If it comes across a .au, or .uk, then this website is going to get indexed in the country where the extension designates. So, if you are looking to register domains for other countries, this is one method of doing it.

Another method is where it is hosted at. The search engine robots will also pull the IP address of the hosting company, which in turn is your websites IP address. If you have a standard .com address, and it is hosted in the UK, then it will be ranked with the UK websites.

Now, you should look carefully into this. Just because you live in the UK, have a .com address, and are using a UK hosting company, you could still not be ranked with the local UK search engines. If the hosting company is actually using servers outside of the UK, then you would not rank for the UK, but rather the hosting IP address’s country. Confusing yet?

This is not to say that I can not have a .com address rank high in the UK, even with my sites hosted in the USA. But, if you want a sure thing, then you should have your sites hosted where you want them to rank.

Here is another tip: When you register your domain name, get the .com, .net, .org, .info, and the .biz. Then, you can pick where you want each one hosted, and have them all be country specific. This might be a good way to dominate the listings internationally. I personally have not done this yet, although I do own all 5 of the Social SEO Guide domains.

One last method of doing this is to use the <address> code. Google recognizes this, and wil interpret it as a physical address. Make sure it is on an “About Us” or “Contact Us” page. Google spiders are pretty smart, and by using the <address> tag it can help the spiders with Google local or regional rankings.

Those are the 3 seo tips for  geo targeting countries. Try them out if you are looking to make a big make a big impact internationally and want your websites to rank high in all of the local search engines as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 7:53 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.