Should You Geo Target The Search Engines As Part Of Your Scotland SEO?
If you are a business with an online presence here in Scotland you may find that geo-targeting the search engines may help your rankings in UK search results. This is particularly true if you have lumbered yourself with a dot com rather than a dot co dot uk domain.
Matt Cutts, in another one of Google’s video presentations, discusses the issue of geo-targeting websites. Google ignores any geo-targeting in meta tags preferring to rely on a combination of domain names, their country code (where appropriate) and the IP address of the server. You can go one step further and tell Google through Webmaster Tools.
Since webmasters have begun using this method to notify Google, there has been a significant increase in the number of dot coms appearing in UK search results. If you do have an online presence that only services a certain geographical area, and it is a dot com that is hosted anywhere but in the UK, I would strongly suggest using Webmaster Tools to focus on the UK search results.
I wouldn’t stop there, however. There are a number of on site SEO strategies that will also increase your chances of ranking well locally. These include placing your business address, or at least the town and country, in the footer. If appropriate, include your telephone number with any regional prefixes. Just imagine someone from overseas needing to call you so include the international code as well – it all helps.
Make frequent uses of local place names as well where appropriate. For example, if you deliver, rather than just stating that you deliver, state where you deliver using regional names. Finally, be sure to claim your business in local search if appropriate.
Put all these pieces together and even a dot com hosted in Australia will rank in UK search results. The search engines are pretty good at guessing which region your sites target – it still helps to tell them. As for geo meta tags – don’t discard them. Google is only one search engine and how the other search engines read these tags is often a mystery. The use of these meta tags will not hurt your site so you may as well include them.
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