For a while, the school of thought has been that in addition to a top level domain for a particular country (.co.uk, .de, etc.), you needed to have local hosting, i.e. your French site is .fr and is hosted (if possible) in France.  The IP address of the site is readable by the search engines, so it was thought that a local IP would help to increase your local relevancy in search results.

That might not be the case anymore.  Jerry West from WebMarketingNow says that based on his conversations at a recent SEO conference, it is much more important to have the correct ccTLD for your site than it is to have local hosting.  The server’s location doesn’t particularly matter.  As he says, you’ll be “far more likely to get localized traffic with the proper TLD than without it.”

This change of thought on local hosting should be good news for website owners.  Local hosting isn’t possible for all websites and businesses, due to expenses and the difficulties in verifying the actual location of the server. More comparison data will eventually confirm whether or not a local host makes any difference, but in the meantime, concentrate on getting that top level domain.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.