.com site with uk pages but how does my garden grow?

For the Advd: .com site seeks better rankings in UK search engine searches

[boats]

.com site <snip> has European pages and offices in the UK and US, but wants to increase its presence in the UK search engines.

a) Is collocation the answer, hosting UK pages in the UK or on UK IP addresses?
b) Will the use of sub domains help. e.g. uk.domain.com?
c) Or is it simply down to the matching of search terms on the home page when the spiders come crawling?

Many search engine optimisation companies can be seen as one sided and may say that they can improve your site listings, but are they just trying to sell their service?
Does the search engines themselves explain how they rank their results?

[edited by: engine at 11:51 am (utc) on April 30, 2003]
[edit reason] no specifics, thanks [/edit]

[IanTurner]

My initial thoughts are the best that you could do is purchase example.co.uk

This will get you the best UK coverage possible.

Secondarily running uk.example.com and hosting it on a UK based IP address.

[boats]

Unfortunately, the domain name is at a cost of £££,£££'s!

I think the sub.domain.com is a good one, but can u host a sub domain on an IP address in the UK when the Domain is hosted in Canada?

[IanTurner]

Yes it is not a problem to host different sub domains on different servers. The DNS record can be modified to allow this.

(Note there are also org.uk and ltd.uk available if the .co.uk has gone.)