Is Server Location important for Your Website?

• Is Server Location important for increasing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your website?
• Are you planning on launching a website in a foreign country or, having a website in multiple languages targeting different countries?

If these are questions that you have asked yourself, then it is important to consider Server Location and Domain Name Extension.

What is the Server Location? This is the location of the server where your website will be hosted. For example if you choose to host with Netcetera, your website will be hosted in the UK.

What is the Domain Name Extension? Domain names are used to identify one or more IP addresses, the most common ones are .com, . net, .co.uk etc.

If you’re serious about localising your website and targeting local customers, you may consider hosting country-specific domains on servers (Server Location) within the target countries. This makes maintaining your web infrastructure more complex, but there are considerable SEO benefits. For example, having a www.yourcompany.it (Local Domain) domain hosted on an Italian server will help you to achieve better rankings in the Italian version of Google.

Having country-specific domains is particularly important if you are targeting a country whose language uses a non-Latin script, like Chinese or Russian.

Another important point to consider is that if your competitor has similar site hosted in Italy (similar page rank etc), he is likely to be shown higher in google.it results and you are likely to be shown higher in google.com results. Naturally you would much rather have the higher ranking in google.it.

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, but registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address is also important. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same.

For any information about purchasing Domain Names in other countries, please visit http://www.netcetera.co.uk/domains/ or contact our Sales Team.