Geo targeting and moving server to another country

[member22]

Hello,

I have a website which is currently ranked in 8 th position in google. I am targeting the USA but my website is located on swiss a server. However in the webmaster tools I selected USA.
Do you think I can gain a few position if I put my website on a us server or no ?

Second question.

I have another website that I just added to google, I am currently on the 72 nd position in the USA, nowhere in the UK and I am targeting UK customers. Would you advise that I change my.com domain name to .co.uk and put it on a UK server ? or is the webmaster tools targeting UK going to be enough.

Thank you

[piatkow]

Not having a .uk will probably loose you a little type in traffic. Not sure if WMT targetting is sufficient but it would only be for G anyway.

[creative craig]

If you wish to target a specific country then I would strongly suggest hosting the site in that country - in my experience it holds alot of weight.

Of course this is only one factor in the grand scheme of SEO :)

[Shaddows]

ccTLD and local hosting combined can definately make a substantial difference- and to hubristically quote myself from another thread [webmasterworld.com]:

I would definately invest in a UK-based server/hosting. We did, and targetted traffic increased. Any targetting improvement will help your CTR- and I'm not the only one who thinks CTR versus [expected CTR for position] affects ranking.

[HuskyPup]

I agree with creative craig and Shaddows,

Some members seem to have not had a problem with geo-targetting however my experiences show that hosting in the target country works better and especially so for relatively new sites.

One thing to be sure of when testing your .com or .co.uk SERPs positioning is to ensure you use a proxy server since IE and Firefox generally will not give you genuine .com & .co.uk results, Opera is usually fairly accurate.

[creative craig]

Another important element to look at is finding sites to link to you who are hosted within your target country.