Geo Target your website with Google Webmaster Tool
This came to my attention today and I wanted to share. You can geo target your website via the Google Webmaster Tool (upon site verification) so that your site will rank higher in a particular country or region! This will only work for generic international extensions like .com, .net and .org. It will also only take effect if a user chooses to narrow their search within that region. But it is a very easy way to increase your chances in ranking a .com domain for example in the UK or in Australia or even in New York as a preferred region with the US.
Here is a question answered yesterday on the Official Google Webmaster blog that came up at SES New York this week:
Q: How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?
A: The instructions in our Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.
If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don’t support setting a geographical target for patterns that can’t be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.
This can be highly significant for businesses needing that edge to geo target their business website to a specific region or country.
