Browse > Home / Search Engine Optimization / Keyword Rankings In Different Search Engines

Keyword Rankings In Different Search Engines

March 7, 2008

Ranking For Keywords in Different Search Engines like google.co.uk, google.ie, google.com.au etc.

A question was brought to me by a member of my Search Engine Optimization Forum asking how do you rank for keywords in different search engines.
Thanks Pete for allowing me to answer this question so I can create an article on it.

If you like this article, please DIGG it by clicking on the icon to the left. Thanks. :)

Ok, Ranking for keywords in different search engines… The answer is pretty simple, we can go about this in different ways.

The most obvious one is to buy a cheap domain name for as little as $6.12 per year. Ensure that the domain name extension ends with, co.uk (to help being ranked in google.co.uk), or com.au domain name extensions to help the ranking in google.com.au search engine, and so on.

If you go to google.com you’ll notice that most of the .com sites are listed there each time you perform a keyword search, same too if you go to google.co.uk you’ll notice most sites are co.uk ones. ;)

That’s one way…

The other is to ensure that your web host is hosted in the UK. It doesn’t really matter if the domain name extension is a .com or a .co.uk or a .ie one, but it does help all the same.

The other way that I know of is to have links pointing from UK sites pointing to yours if you want to be ranked in the UK Google Search Engine. Or Australian sites linking to you to be ranked in the Australian Google Search Engine. I would be sure that the .co.uk site that you’re getting a link from, is hosted in the UK - again, this doesn’t really matter if the link you are getting from the .co.uk site is hosted in the UK, but if it is, all the better. :)

Let’s look it like this… Every web hosted domain has an IP address, whether that be shared, or unique IP Address. When you have one website linking to you, it’s classed as a VOTE, and saying, “I like this web site, here’s more information“, kinda thing. Regardless if this link is being linked from by the same web host using the same IP address as the link is being pointed to. A link is a link a VOTE is a VOTE.

The weight behind this vote is what comes into question, the more unique and relevant the vote is, the more weight is applied to that link and the keyword that’s encased in it (hyper text link).

Each Search Engine prioritizes what websites it should index. And the most common sense thing would be to group all the .com’s together, all the .co.uk’s together, all the .com.au’s together and so on, each on their own server. These search engines have some sort of GeoTargeting that reads your IP address of your ISP and takes you to the most related search engine. Common sense tells us why would we want to see all the UK websites of Products and or Services if we live in Australia? Why would we want to read information that happened in the UK when we Live in Australia, surely the information located in our place of living at the time is going to be more of an interest, right? What if you wanted to find a service address in your country, would looking in the UK search engine going to help if you Lived in India, Australia, Spain, or where ever? So the answer here is everything is indexed in their own filofax, so to speak.

And how it collects that data to determine where it should be placed, ie, google.com, google.co.uk, google.com.au, etc is either by the domain name’s extension, the website host server location, or the votes from one location that’s different from your server hosts location that’s in another country. And of course if a different domain name extension from your own is being linked to you. Remember, VOTES win the day, more votes you get, more important the search engine deems your page to be will then only be indexed in another search engine by default.

With the basics out of the way, you then need to start working on some onpage optimization and offpage optimization, stating the main elements on the page that helps the search engine know you offer, say; products / services / advice to UK and or Australian Citizens, or offer Free Shipping to UK & Australian Countries. These elements need to be clear on the page; meta description tag, title tag, H1 tag as the main areas. Keyword meta tags don’t really do much in the sense of helping you rank for a page, I’ve found ranking for web pages without the keyword meta tag had a higher rank than those that did have a keyword meta tag. Any hows, there still are some search engines out there that use the keyword meta tag, so, I guess it’s ones preference to have one or not.

Other than these elements, ensure that there’s keywords stating UK (United Kingdom) on the page. Adding parenthesis ( ) around an abbreviation. ie. United Kingdom (UK) Services. Australian (AUS) Services, etc, giving the page more insight to what the page is about. Of course adding these names in the page-name.htm always helps.

Do you have a UK Postal Address and Phone number? Add these to your pages, especially in your privacy policy page, or contact us page, or terms page, or what have you. Anything you can think of to shoutout to the search engine “Hey, my page is about UK Services, please list me in the UK Search Engine, thanks” - always say thanks to the search engines. ;)

Any ways up, that about covers it. Pretty simple stuff eh?

I hope you enjoyed this article.

Feel free to comment if you have any questions, or need further explaining, it’ll be my pleasure to help.

P.S
If you did like this article, please DIGG me, icon below. :) If you would like to be notified when more articles are created, please by all means, locate the top right hand corner of this page and fill in your email address in the eNews box and confirm the subscription and you’ll automatically receive a notification when I create another article.

Thanks.


Written by Loz · Filed Under Search Engine Optimization 

Comments

3 Responses to “Keyword Rankings In Different Search Engines”

  1. Peter Claridge on March 10th, 2008 5:55 am

    Hey, good post Loz. I think it might be harder to rank in a country specific search engine like google.co.uk because most link building campaigns are more targeted to the general search engine like google.com. Now having a list of directories & article directories, social bookmarking sites, forums/blogs with which country they are hosted in…that might be useful!

  2. youngpup246 on May 10th, 2008 1:52 pm

    Is there a way to have one website to be listed in four or more search engines? Like China, australia, canada, UK. I am thinking here, to do that I could get four domain names with the appropriate country extension, com.au, com.uk etc. Then have those domain names point to my domain name that I want all the traffic to funnel to. Is there other ways, perhaps cheaper and simpler?

  3. Loz on May 10th, 2008 2:43 pm

    Hi ya,

    I removed your email address mate, it’s already on file.

    Yes, google and other search engines will place your site in ALL of their search engines, but where you rank in those will be different from another.

    If you want to rank in china search engine at the top, hunt for sites that have the cn domain extension and get links from them. Or com.au, or .ca, or co.uk.

    All the best

    Loz

Got something to say?