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Need some advice on pitfalls/perils of SEO in regards to being listed in search engines like google.ca, ca.yahoo.com, etc.
Our optimal solution is to have our sub-domain site which will be something like canada.oursite.com hosted where our database and U.S. sites reside right here in the U.S.
However, I have read that there are advantages to hosting your content in the target country (Canada in this case) BUT we have some major performance issues with accessing our database from a site located in Canada. We're already having problems with performance issues because of the latency with DB calls back and forth. Replication and local copies of db are out of the question :)
OK, so now you have some background... Basically, is it easy enough to get a sub-domain listed in the specific targeted country search engine even though it would be a U.S. hosted site with no country code extension?
I see that Google Webmaster Central has a tool now for submitting sites to countries specifically? Anyone have any experience with that? Has it worked well?
Yahoo has a Site Explorer in beta for Canada. How does a U.S. site best get listed in Yahoo Canada?
I haven't researched MSN as of yet.
Any input is appreciated.
Of course the closer your site/web server is to your database (preferably in the same DC connected with fibre) the better you are as latency would be almost nill and requests to your database would be faster...
Unless you have a high traffic site, you might want to take a closer look at how your code is accessing the database... are you using select statements generated from the web page or just calling stored procedures... etc... ensuring all connections are being closed and released, security measures optimized... damn there is a lot to think about with respect to improving the speed of database calls.
As far as ranking in serps goes, if the page is optimized using key phrase sequences that include "canada" + "your widget" ... your off to a good start. The physical location of the files/webserver has no relevance. I'd be more concerned about black listed server ip ranges and things like that... I have plenty of test sites that use the .cn (china) tld that rank high on canadian serps for the "canada" version of x widget.
SE submission is a scam. Anyone telling you any different is a scammer too or just ingorant.
HTH... Mike.
