geo targeting seo

[flyingbiker]

I am new to SEO. My business is international. But i really want to target people in Australia, and the UK. My site comes up on the first page for my keywords on google.com but not for the UK and Australian versions of google. I have been looking into geo targeting and have found several choices.


1. buy a .co.uk & .com.au domain name and have them hosted in those countries so there is a local IP address.
2. set up a sub folder for those countries in my .com domain ie. .com/uk and tell the google webmaster tools that they are for targeted regions of the world. But i am having issued making that work for my website as i am not a designer.
3. submit to UK and Aus article directories (although having a hard time finding some).

I would like to get a balance between effectiveness, cost and effort. If i submit articles I assume i will have to use .com/uk in the resource box if i use the subfolder method or .co.uk if i use the local domain method. Is this correct?

Looking forward to guidance and thank you in advance.

[Boxa]

Hi,
I have a website which has a fairly competitive 'howto' keyword and was finding it hard to beat others with the .com, so I decided to try .com.au, .co.uk, .co.nz etc based on where most of the traffic was coming from on the Google Stats.. The website content is seasonal so I have set them up so in the UK it shows winter while in Australia it shows Summer, this way I'm hoping of getting around the duplicate content thing..

I also found that when searching in Australia I am #1 for many keywords I couldn't get as the .com and when searching in the UK I'm working my way up the ranks too... even some of the .com.au sites are appearing in the UK/NZ search over the .com. My traffic is now 5 times more that it was just as the .com just on the .com.au site.

When posting links back to my domain, I spread them across different the different domains and when posting on our facebook page.. I try target each of the posts to go to the different sites for each market.

We didn't try the /com/uk/ option.. But are finding the geo targeting of the domains has really helped. Also try using the Google trends for a few of your keywords.. We found some had double the traffic in the US but was the opposite in Australia and tweeked the websites to match the targeting countries search trends.. we seem to be on the winning track now.

I hope this helps...

[addyj672]

For ranking well in UK and Australia you need get more and more backlinks from .uk websites and .au website. As you already enjoy good ranking on google.com so it will not be difficult for you and it will require less time. Get backlinks from .uk and .au websites and get good ranking on google.co.uk and google.au.....