Ranking in Country Specific Search Engines

Google as a search engine believes in bringing closest relevant results for the search not only in terms of keywords but also location. Location is important in search engine optimization. It is actually very irritating for a Japanese-speaking individual to continually get websites returned in a search query that are written in French or in Chinese.

You may wonder how a search engine return the results the user is looking for in the right language? Why your website does not rank well in other countries?

The fact the country can be determined based on the domain name (like .co.uk or .com.au), and also the IP addresses. IP addresses of computers are not same. IP addresses of the same country may have something in common making it different from other countries IP address. Search engines are programmed with information that tells them which IP addresses belong to which particular country, as well as which domain suffixes are assigned to which countries.

For instance, you aspire to rank high in Google based in London. Now inspite of all your efforts it may not do well for the difference in the IP address. In this case you might have to switch your web host to one whose servers reside in London.

A tool called the Website to Country Tool can be recommended to face this problem. This tool will allow you to view which country your website is hosted in and also help you determine a possible reason why your website may not be ranking as highly as you might like in a particular search engine.