How to make your blog rank high on regional search engines?

Recently, Google had announced that a websites search engine ranking will depend on it’s server location attributes.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web servers IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

Recently, Rand had this topic illustrated beautifully at the whiteboard Friday video.

Let’s do a detail study on what factors will decide your blogs rankings on various  regional search engines.

1. TLD – Top level domains
   The engines categorize your blog/site to a particular region based on your domain. i.e, for a .co.au – Australia, co.nz – New Zealand, .ru – Russia and the like. And based on where the search originates – to where your site is, match the ranks are determined.
   Ex: A user searching for “selling old books” from Australia will get probably www.ebay.co.au as the top rank while for someone from NewZealand, will get www.ebay.co.nz
2. Server location
   Many of us don’t have the luxury to chose this, but some sites do. Particularly those who are using independent servers (Kevin, please correct me if I’m wrong here..) can chose where to locate their servers. A US based server may be expensive than a UK based one, and you may select the UK server even though your company is based in Australia. But for the Search Engines, your company is based in UK, since your servers are there. So your pages may be thrown(against appropriate searches) more in the UK in the SERPS than in Australia.
3. Physical Address in HTML
   Another point that the engines look for is your physical address in the HTML code. Rand thinks it’s a good idea to use the footer to present your address while, I think otherwise. The footer is a good real estate for other vital information regarding your blog. While the engines look for the address in your page, it does not matter if it is on the header or footer. So placing it in a separate page, say your contact page and if necessary near your “About me” description is cool enough. The engines will pick it up to determine where you are from.
4. Links
   This point is the loose one out of all. Engines determine your location based on the geo locations where from your incoming links originate. And obviously, you have no control over this, so it doesn’t carry much importance as others. But yes, if you can manage more links from your local network, it shows that your presence is pretty strong there and it’s more relevant to show your pages at the SERPS in the particular area.

While, blogspot and free wordpress users have less or no control over these factors, others do and you can select the right mix of all these factors to determine if your blog should rank high for a particular keyword in US or the UK or just about anywhere else.

Written by Mani Karthik from Daily SEO Blog
Posted on September 10th, 2007 and filed under Search Engine Optimisation
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