Any ideas?

I have a problem with several of my sites, they are dotcoms, written in english and aimed more at the uk market.
They come up on page 3 and 12 with G.com but miles away on G.co.uk. When I say miles the one on 12 doesn't come up on the fist 50!
Anyone know why? Someone has suggested setting the area in G analytics to the U.K will this work?
All ideas greatly received!

two things...
1. i always use .co.uk as i target local
2. if renew you domain name every year then your site will look like
to google that it is a spammy fly by night website and will not be taken seriously

there are many other factors to take into account also.. if you
want you can send me the url of the site that is ranking poorly and i can give you some pointers..

I appreciate I my have been better of using a .co.uk, however one of the sites needs to be found outside the uk although I suspect a lot of the traffic will come from England.
I will pm you the 2 causing me the most problems, ironically I have just checked one in G.com for one of the search terms and it is 7th on page 1 on G.co.uk it does not show up on the 1st 10 pages!
I am sending you the 2 urls many thanks for your time!
Twix70

Is it hosted on a UK ip address? Have you tried getting links from sites hosted in the U.K ?

No it's hosted on hostgator. I am looking to get some uk backlinks and I have gone on webmaster tools and set the geographical region to the uk to see if that helps.
I have also put them on google maps in the uk to see if that helps. THanks for the suggestions and any further suggestions greatly received!

If you want to target www.google.co.uk, it is very preferred to select a domain that has .co.uk extension. Check your top 10 competitors and figure out how many of them have the domain extension of ".co.uk". If you find even 2-3 of them having ".com" extension than chances are that you can also get on top of first page of Google using your very same ".com" domain. The strategy you need to target to achieve that result would be:

TRY TO GET AS MANY AS BACKLINKS AS YOU CAN HAVING ".CO.UK" DOMAIN EXTENSION.

It could be:
i) PR Directories (having .co.uk domains)
ii) Article Directories (Having .co.uk domains)
iii) Forums for profile link (having .co.uk domains)
iii) .co.uk Web Directories

Make use of the word "UK" throughout title and content in your website to make it UK local specific. Hopefully, after a hard work of consistent linkbuilding making on .co.uk domains you will get your desired results.

are you saying you should purchase like 5 years in one go ?

how on earth do google know how long you bought for ? LOL.. OH Yeh, they know everything...

kez1000 said:

two things...

2. if renew you domain name every year then your site will look like
to google that it is a spammy fly by night website and will not be taken seriously

.

Click to expand...

From what I've read, the length of time a domain is registered for does have some factor in its ranking, but much, much less than backlinks and onsite SEO. If you have money to register it for a few years, go ahead... otherwise, I wouldn't worry about it.

Using a uk IP address (server) can help massively for local traffic if you are using a uk domain such as .co.uk also Google accounts for the response speed from a website so having a uk server can help with this also.

ok great. its only like 8usd a year, so will do 5 years then. never realized it mattered at all.

Seb Ali, thanks given. I have never looked at the amount of years a site has been renewed for and along with the other points I have taken it on board.

I didn't mention earlier however that the site was registering in serps in a similar position in both G searches prior to an xrumer blast, so I think I have discovered the problem ie. the blast will have probably included far less uk sites than worldwide.

HOWEVER the other site has never had a blast done and the searches are still showing different results.

As I posted earlier I have changed region in gmaster tools so I will let you know if this makes a difference. I am also looking to link to uk sites more than others for a while.

Any further suggestions taken on board.

Thanks