I made a quick reply to a question posed on Marketing Chat forum but thought I would expand upon it here the question went,
The site was up until the start of last year US based, though about a year ago it was moved to UK servers. He's looking to get the site listed at #1 in the .co.uk version. Apart from building links from UK based sites does anyone have any other ideas how this can be achieved? I'm guessing Google simply hasn't recognised the fact that the site has moved.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I don't think it makes much difference where your servers are located, or rather the difference is limited. This is based on anecdotal evidence we have run and maintained sites with .co.uk domains on servers in the UK, USA and Germany. We have also moved sites wholesale between providers and countries with no loss of position in SERPs. Now unless your looking for correlation tracking changes is very hard to do particularly when there are so many variables but we have been very successful in wholesale domain moves and have never noticed a problem. It also stands that as we move more to distributed systems for providing our hosts with processor power the physical location of the box will be less important. So how then can we Geo-Target a domain to a specific country and in particular for Google?
Domain names
It might not be an option if you already have the domain but for new sites that are targeting both a local and global audience its worth getting a country specific domain name such as .co.uk. This is for a search engine the equivalent of a neon sign in terms of giving it a hint as to which country your targeting. This advice also includes guys over the pond in the US while many think the US has exclusive rights to use .com domain names the .us TLD (top level domain) has been in use for a while, given the new emphasis on local search it may be worth thinking about using a US specific domain name. Most (but not all) require a business or individual to be a resident of that country to buy a domain name, and each country has a naming authority in the UK this is Nominet and it is these companies that set the rules.
Language
Probably the most overlooked aspect of optimisation for a specific country is telling Google the language your pages are using, given that the XHTML standard allows you to declare language in both the HTML tag and through meta tags lets take an example of French <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr">
<head>
<title>The title</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> ... Alternatively if not using XHTML1.1 you could use a meta tag... <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr"> Now the first is more semantically correct, but the second method is more flexible and allows you to be able to select multiple languages for a page. Both however can supply almost any language including en-GB for British English, now why its not default I'm not sure but oh well. Now language alone is not going to help with anything other then basic guidance after all you can have a guest house in Scotland with visitors coming from Germany who you wish to be able to book via your site!
Location, Location, Location
The simplest method is to tell Google where your site is based, most companies have an 'About Us' or 'Contact Us' page, which as part of good practices should include a postal address anyway, one of the most common faults is to fail to include the country (I know it sounds daft, but yes I agree you better go check your now;) ), a second useful nugget for a search engine is a longitude and latitude of your business and therefore your site, now it may seem odd including this detail on an About Us page but it can be explained away as simply to aid those with satellite navigation systems - and you never know it could be true. When formatting addresses you have a couple of choices the address tag and or Adr. The address tag is one of those tags that over the years has had many meanings and is currently under dispute however it is reported that Google interprets anything within the address as a physical address, so <address> However my preferred option is to use a Adr which is a microfomat, a microformat is an agreed use of certain tags in particular div or span to provide semantic meaning, it may not currently be used specifically by search engines but it is search engine friendly as well as human friendly and easy to style.
My House
Some street
Some where
United Kingdom
post code
</address> <div class="adr"> Adr works well when combined with 2 other microformats Geo and Hcard, Geo is a location aware microformat which is a fragment from the vcard definition.
<div class="street-address">My House</div>
<div class="extended-address">Some street<&
#47;div>
<span class="locality">Some where</span>,
<span class="postal-code">post code</span>
<div class="country-name">United Kingdom</div>
</div> <span class="geo"> Hcard, is an XML/XHTML variant of the Vcard and when combined with Adr & Geo provides semantic information about an individual and or business along with locational information.
<span class="latitude">37.386013</span>,
<span class="longitude">-122.082932</span>
</span>
Keywords
This one goes without saying, using variants of a country name as keywords will help ranking, so in the case of Tim Nash the IT consultant, using anchor text such as Tim Nash a UK IT Consultant would be preferable. Remember country names will be more effective then town names, there are multiple Bostons', Yorks', and Washingtons' out there but only one France for example.
Back links
Finally back links from the country your targeting, getting these back links provides authority and trust, particularly if they are in your subject area, when marketing a country specific site, try country specific directories and look for those in your field with similar interests who are local. Hopefully this advice will help those who are struggling in getting ranked in their countries search engines. <
Thanks for the excellent post Tim. I’m going to put your ideas to the test and try and get our .org site displaying in the UK serps.
Thank you for tips and the code! I bet most webmasters have never thought of some of these things.
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