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One thing I'm working on is their title tag which is the same for each page. So how does Google work out regionality?
Is it on page stuff like title, tags, text or is it from off page stuff like in bound links?
At the momnet I'm going through DMOZ and adding to each regional employment category. Anything else I should be doing? Other than create regional sites as they outsource design.
Thanks
Getvisibleuk
Not many people will change their default settings, so they are not likely to choose "pages from the UK" - some will.
Safest course is to set up a site in each TLD and be careful not to make it a carbon copy of the others. Yes, it will be inconvenient but will do what the client expects.
This is normally true, but in the case of google.co.uk, many visitors go there by typing in the url directly and so are already deviating from the default.
From my logs, a large percentage of those who have taken the trouble to go the .co.uk instead of .com choose the uk-only search, especially for commercial searches, as they want to find a business in their own country.
especially for commercial searches, as they want to find a business in their own country.
how right you are. i always limit search results when i want to shop to uk only.
I don't understand, Google.co.uk defaults to worldwide search, or am I missing something?
getvisibleuk - If their server is in the US then get them a .co.uk address with unique content. That way they will qualify for 'uk only' searches on google and also aol/yahoo who only show .co.uk irrespective of hosting location.
I think the figure is around 25% who click the 'UK only' option, though this may be lower.
"This is normally true, but in the case of google.co.uk, many visitors go there by typing in the url directly and so are already deviating from the default. "I don't understand, Google.co.uk defaults to worldwide search, or am I missing something?
anallawalla said "Not many people will change their default settings". Not many people have Google.co.uk as the default setup on their browser, so by going they they are already deviating from the default settings.
I conclude from this that they are also the type of visitor who will choose uk-only once they get to the site, and this seems to be confirmed in logs that I have checked, by the number of referrers from google UK who choose that option.
However you need to be careful because Google are not very good at locating sites in this way, and often mislocate sites using .com/.net/.org etc. domain. The only sure-fire way of getting into google uk-only results is to buy a UK-specific domain like .co.uk, .org.uk etc.
I think the hosting in UK is a second best option. I can see that site maintenance is easier if there is only one site covering both UK and worldwide, but AOL and Yahoo 'UK only searches' are missed. Probably small traffic in the grand scale of things but enough for the effort required.
A .co.uk site is, as you say, a pretty reliable way of getting in, as long as the site content is not duplicated with the .com site. Another tack is to use 'UK' in the title and content of the .com site. Many people search on 'worldwide searches' and then put 'UK' on the end to regionally define the search.
Quite strangly their site is hosted in New Zealand and they use a design company that charges by the hour. They're also very precious about their brand too.
Will go down the route of getting inbound links from sites in all the different countries and get the title and description to change reflecting on when visitors are searching for vancancies in different regions.
From that I'll recomend that they have regional sites to target the other nations. The only probs is that it may screw with their content management system? They're not paying a lot and don't think they'll uplift the rate until they start to see some improvement in traffic. The good old chicken and the egg problem!
Wish me luck!
GetVisibleUK
