Optimizing for Other Countires

[tml89]

Im starting a website that is targeted to Uk consumers. What is the best way to optimize for uk as opposed to north american google results? Some phrases have uk in them but others dont and could be used by people from north america or the uk.

The only things I can think of right now are co.uk domain, and get links from co.uk sites.

What else can I do?

[CygnusX1]

Hi TML89,

I had a similar problem with a customer wanting to optimize to help their listings in UK. CA. and AU.

We searched the internet and found that several companies had researched the same questions. They found that many countries will list top websites first from their own country, then websites from other countries. I do remember one of the countries {Sweden} that the number was 80% of results were from domains that were from Sweden.

I don’t know how old that information was, or how reliable. But it was from a researching firm.

I’m not saying all countries are this way, but there are some posts in here that discusses it. You will need to do a search to find those posts.

[tedster]

Host your site in the UK (big help)
Put a UK street address in the footer of every page

[reseller]

CygnusX1

>We searched the internet and found that several companies had researched the same questions. They found that many countries will list top websites first from their own country, then websites from other countries. I do remember one of the countries {Sweden} that the number was 80% of results were from domains that were from Sweden.<

Maybe it is just a coincident, but my site with a Danish domain (.dk) rank on top 10 for competitive keyphrases on google UK serps.

Its also therefore I sing every morning:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves ;-)

[koan]

In addition to hosting with a company physically residing in the targetted country, having the country specific domain extension (.ca, .uk), adding this language header probably wouldn't hurt either:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-UK">

[sem4u]

UK hosting, a .co.uk domain and of course English spellings.

[coco]

Google UK rankings are skewed towards UK tld and hosting. Has been for several months.

Also Google.com is redirected to Google.co.uk from the UK

.co.uk and/or UK hosting is a must.

And not just the spelling that's different. UK vocabulary can be very different to US depending on the industry.

[steve]

Write pages based around:

Widgets in <City> - London, Manchester, Birmingham, etc.
Widgets in <County> - Essex, Surrey, Cumbria, etc.

Seek links from local directories to these pages, link to local sites from them.