Even some of the Best SEO (search engine optimisation) experts forget to tell webmasters one of the most important Google ranking factors: Google determines the geographical location of your website by checking where the servers of your web host are located. If the servers of your host are located in another country than your target country, then you will never be able to rank high in country specific Google search engines. And almost everybody uses a country specific Google search engine ! So, let's say, your website is targeting the UK and the servers of your web host are in the US (many UK web hosts have their servers in the US), then Google will assume that your target country is the USA. This means that you will never rank high in Google.co.uk. And, for example, your website is targeting the US and the servers of your web host are in the UK (some US web hosts have their servers in the UK), then Google will assume that your target country is the UK. This means that you will never rank high in Google.com

Another, often overlooked, factor is the fact that domain names are very important for SEO optimization as well. A domain name should always have a TLD (domain name extension) that matches the country the webmaster is targeting. This means for example, that using a .com extension for a website targeting the UK market, is a wrong choice. The domain extension should be .co.uk in this case. Webmasters, not following these rules, will never rank high in the Google search engine for the country they are targeting. So this also means that, if a webmaster is targeting the USA, then he/she should never use a .co.uk or other country extension

And here are some more rules: a commercial website should not end in .org, the country of the administrative and technical contacts as displayed in the Whois (this is the public information on any domain), should always match the country that the site owner is targeting, for businesses the domain registration period should be at least two years. A website, registered for one year only, will not be taken seriously by Google. Finally, entrepreneurs should always be able to modify their own Whois information in an online account

The problem here is that many website owners are violating one or more of the above rules. I consider it as frustrating to see so many webmasters spending money, time and energy on optimising their websites, while actually they don't have any chance at all to rank high in Google. So please don't make a capital domain name or hosting mistake at the very first beginning of your Internet adventure. In the current online situation, many webmasters should change their domain names and/or switch to other web hosts, in order to create higher ranking.

But here's the Good News: it's easy to do this, without losing any search rank, page rank or link popularity of the old site. This simple solution is the implementation of a so called Google friendly redirect from the old url to the new one. The above mentioned optimization tips site and an online ebook, located at another page of the same website, explain how to resolve this problem easily. The two pages also offer many other free seo tips on how to rank high in country specific Google search engines in no time.