In the next little bit, I am going to start an e-Commerce site catering for Canadian customers. I wanted some guidance on the SEO parameters of the site, in specifically, hosting and domain names.

I read that in optimizing for Canadian users and Google.ca in particularly, I need a .ca domain name. The rationale behind this is that Google matches the results based upon a user's search location. I know that the latter statement is correct, but will .ca make such a huge difference for me? Any more opinions on this subject? I did a few searches and it does seem like there's a noticeable discrepancy between google.com and google.ca.

The importance of hosting is also an interesting issue to me. I heard that I need to host my website with a Canadian web host so the IP location that Google detects can be traced to Canada. Is that so? Again the rationale behind this is based upon Google's tendency to match results based upon a user's search location. I did a few searches myself and used whoistools to determine the IP and it seemed like all the IP locations were somewhere in the United States.

Finally, as far as page titles and body text are concerned, should I write my content as usual targeting my main keywords or should I do sprinkle various keywords like Canada, Canadian and etc... to rank better on Google.ca?

Thanks