Martyketing Blog – Online & Offline Marketing By Martin Pascoe

Do you have your web hosting overseas? There’s often many reasons why you might.

 The question is does it help your SEO rankings? Is it worthwhile or a BIG NO no…

There are many reasons why you might want or need to host your sites in a country other than the one where you reside or do the majority of your business. Let’s look at some of these and the possible outcomes for your sites.

Businesses will often choose to have a country specific domain (.uk .ca .co.nz etc.) if they have a subsidiary outlet in that country doing business, particularly if it has a physical address. The benefits are very good for any local search that finds your company within the search for any particular geographical area.

Companies opting for an international reach without using any approach other than a virtual one, still may find it useful to employ a country specific domain, and the associated web hosting, to try and capture some of the market share to be found there.

Other savvy web guru’s, in their attempts to try and set up a network of sites with varying IP addresses, will use web hosting overseas to accomplish their needs. Usually these network sites are of little value, except for their short term use in gaming the search engines in search of higher rankings. Many businesses are now launching microsites locally and internationally on key topics to enable their business to improve SEO rankings.

The effects of hosting your sites in a country other than the one in which you do business is very difficult to measure, there is some evidence that suggests that sites with a country specific domain, say a .uk domain extension  will be favored more than a .com, .net or other extension in that particular market. Geo-location plays a part in how the search engines  view who a site is intended to serve.

 If you are aiming to target a specific audience, you should use a country specific domain extension, use web hosting in that area, and focus on building links that come mainly from sites in that geo-location.

The search engines can read not only the domain extension, but incoming links, IP addresses, physical addresses in your content and more for use in determining where you intend your market to be. If you want to rank for terms in a specific region or country, doing your best to line up all the factors that affect how your pages are viewed makes plenty of sense.

This can make a great difference in your rankings for certain countries. While a .com might have a hard time ranking for your terms in a global or US market, that same site may do a great deal better in a more limited market, especially by virtue of a highly targeted site, domain extension, IP address and more that it would have working for it. Definitely worth thinking about, if you are chasing global business.

It’s not always easy to set-up hosting overseas and some thought needs to go into your goals and objectives before setting out to look for an overseas host.
Hopefully this can give you some assistance in what some people are doing!

But remember it’s much better to have your own business hosted locally for support and service, if you’re having problems it’s much easier to deal witha  local hosting provider and it’s also better to have your data stored locally.

Over n out!!