The mystery behind Geo Targeting is still around for some, others seem to have found their answer for geo targeting, but is there any right or wrong answer for it? Well, geographic targeting as a whole is designed to help improve results for Google’s regional search.

It makes perfect sense and helps remove irrelevant results for users based on demographics.
If a British citizen searches on Google for used cars, why would an American dealership be of any use?. If a French student searches Google for local laptop retailers, why would results from the UK be relevant?

This is just an example, imagine the amount of possibilities of poor search results if geographic targeting didn’t exist.

So, the principle is simple, if a search is conducted from a specific region, Google will return results that are actually relevant to the region, even in parts of the country.

Google does this by a series of simple evaluation factors. Google will check your ip address to understand where you are searching from, when searching, results will be returned based on your demographics and your Google preferences.

If you search in Google UK, and you are based in the UK, your results will be UK results. If you search in Google.com your results will be a mix of Worldwide and UK results. If you search in Google.de from the UK you get German results.

Geographic targeting is vital, because it prevents excessive volumes of foreign results flooding natural search. Google has utilised geographic targeting for the past 7 years, however, this system has been refined over and over again.

But what about your websites hosting, how does your hosting and top level domain impact on search engine optimisation. Well, if those who are searching within Google want results relevant to them, they will have to be filtered by Geographic’s. This is where your selection of domain Geographic’s and top level domain is important.

If you select a domain extension that does not match your target country, then you will suffer additional issues when attempting to rank within the market. You should make sure that the domain you choose has an extension that is relative to your target market. If you are aiming to rank well in the UK then you should select a .co.uk extension, whereas if you were targeting Canada, then you should select a .ca domain extension.

Alongside this, your hosting should be within a similar region, if your hosting is in the target country, this will help immensely. Although hosting and domain selection is important, the location of hosting is not as important as the domain extension.

Its always ideal to keep your domain extension relative to the country of hosting, whilst making sure both fit within the region of the target market, this will ensure your website has better potential to rank in the Google version for that region.

If you would like to check where your website is hosted, install a plugin for Firefox known as Flagfox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5791

This will provide you with a small tool that will show a flag corresponding to the country of hosting residence.

You can also use a selection of tools online including http://www.dnsstuff.com
These tools will allow you to learn more about your websites hosting and domains.