How to I attract global traffic? With a .com? Google geo-targeting? Help please!

Hi all,

My brother is looking to launch a new website. He is based in Australia, however he would like the website to have a global reach (i.e. he ultimately hopes to archive good keyword rankings in global searches). Therefore as a start I have advised him to register a .com domain instead of a .com.au

The confusion begins with how Google will treat this site in global searches (e.g. using google.com), instead of say google.com.au

For instance, I believe that if the site is a .com but hosted in Australia, then Google will look at the IP address of the host, determine that it is hosted in Australia and assume that this is the target market.

So question 1: How will having a .com hosted in Australia affect the potential of the site to rank for his chosen keywords in global searches? I have previously been advised to register a .com for him and host it in the US. However, surely Google will then see from the hosts IP address that the site is hosted in the US, and assume that the US is the target market instead? So this doesn’t really help.

Question 2: With Google webmaster tools, you can set the target region for a site. So I could take my Australia hosted site, but tell Google that the UK is my target market.

However, 2 problems here. Firstly, again this doesn’t help because what I really want is to host the site where I want and tell goggle that it is not specifically targeted at any one place, but lots! Secondly the small print says that the geo-targeting will only come into effect is someone searches for that region using advanced search.

e.g. If I’m in the UK but only want to see sites targeted at Australia, then I have to select this in advanced options (clearly the average web user just uses the standard search box ).

How can I give this site the best shot of reaching a global market no matter where it is hosted?

Cheers,

Dave

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advertise holiday homes

I suggest only using a .com domain as you will still show up and rank in other countries. .com is the universal domain name ender

My suggestions are that you should use a .com only and that you should have the domain hosted in the US - with both of those you should then without a problem be showing up in the global search.

even if your website is a .com or a .com.au it has nothing to do with hosting or anything.. if you know how to promote/optimized your website then I am pretty sure that it will have a good ranking to search engines.

you can take .com from people point of you because it is easy to remember but this is not so important for the seo

Hi djdavejones,

I think you should buy other country specific domain and host them in same country. For example if your target audience from Uk, buy a domain with co.uk and host the website Uk as well. I'm not going against anyone but it also one of the factor for ranking well on any country if your website is hosted in same country.

By doing this you can easily target your audience globally. Now you don't even have to create different version of the website. You can use the same content on all different websites.

Randfish writes a post about the same from SMX Sydney conference in Australia. Here is what he tells in his post (a summary image)



more you can read at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-info-...geting-balance