Geolocation - does UK/US spelling matter?

[mooperlee]

I have a site that really targets anyone who can read English, but I'm based in the UK and so have a slight interested in getting higher in the UK results (but not at the expense of the US results).

At the moment I rank around 20ish for my big keyword in the US google, and about 50ish in the UK google. This seems a bit odd - my server is based in the UK and comes up as UK-based when I check it on Whois. I have a standard .com tld.

I'm trying to figure how to get higher in the UK results. One article I read today suggested that UK spellings may influence Google. At the moment I use US spellings. Has anyone found that using UK spellings helps, or had any experience of this? Do you thinks that area spellings is something that Google would bother to measure?

[tedster]

I've read some Google comments (and even some lines in patents) that suggest language variants might be an influence. But so far, I've heard no reports "in the wild" about using this approach and seeing improvements. and as you suggest, if you did improve UK results this way, then it might well be at the expense of your US rankings.

I'd be very interested in hearing about real world experience this area, too.