We are often faced with helping an SEO client target a specific locale for their website. With that said Google particularly, and the other search engines have many different techniques you can use to let them know your site is catered to a specifc area or location. Below are a few tips you can use to help let Google and the others know where you targeting.
- Google Webmaster Central – Google Webmaster Central has a notification where you can specifically let Google know you only what your site to show up in the SERPS for a particular region.
- Whois Information – Your domain whois address is looked at by the search engines and based on the information you have listed the search engines determine what country your site is from.
- Hosting data center – Your web site hosting plan plays an important role to because they look at the data center that your web site is hosted by. Make sure the web hosting data center is from a provider based in your country.
- Incoming Links - Your incoming links should be coming from websites in the same country you are located in. If alot of your links are coming from for example a .ca extension they might think your website is located in Canada.
- On page website address - Simply putting your postal address on your website can help let the search engines know what region you are in. I know this is an obvious one but you won’t beleive how many forget this.
- Local Sites and Directories - Sign up and claim your listings on Yellow Pages, City Search, Google Maps, Yahoo local, and MSN Live Local.
These are just some tactics we use that are simple enough for anyone to check and implement for your own site. You might be surprised by how just these small changes can help your SEO rankings in the region/location you are targeting.
