Effective Ways of Geo Targeting in SEO

The purpose of any site is to increase the amount of visitors to the website. Geo-targeting is an essential part of aiming your site for the particular visitors who visit your site. The term “GEO targeting” is basically the technique of doing online marketing of a site in accordance to the visitor’s geographical location. Online marketing through Geo targeting will help the website owner increase profit and help users get the precise search results they are in need of.

Geo targeting plays an important role in the process of search engine optimization (SEO) for your site. With time, search engines are becoming increasingly advance and modify their algorithm from time to time to make searchers available recent information.  Geo targeting the site for a particular country or state helps search engine identify the target audience in the targeted state and increase your ranking in their search results accordingly.  

For optimization it’s important that the Web Hosting Provider’s server should be located in the region where your target market is. For instance, if your target audience is Pakistan or India or China, and your server is located in America, then optimizing your site for region specific search engine will not be possible.   

SEO experts make use of many effective ways of Geo targeting. These help search engine like Google know that the website is targeted to a specific region. Following are some of the favored options that SEO experts make use of when they go about geo targeting a site.   

Various Effective Ways of Geo-Targeting

Google Webmaster tools: Google webmaster tool is widely used by most of the SEO experts. The reason being, it is one of the most easiest and effective tool. It gives an option that allows you to tell Google search engine, in which geographic location you want your site to be visible in the search results. One more thing that majority of the people are not aware of is that, you can also have various geographic targets for a sub domain and also a domain sub folder.

Domain whois address: Domain Whois address also determines your website’s geographic location. By looking at your site’s domain whois address, Google search engine will give your site higher preference in the state where your site is registered.

Web Hosting Provider’s Server: As discussed earlier, you need to make sure that your website is hosted in the state where your target market is. Therefore, look for a web hosting plan in a country where your target market is located. 

Logically Partition of your website in accordance to geographic region: Google is considered to be quite intelligent in terms of figuring out if you are targeting one region or many. Therefore, if you’re targeting two or three region, you need to ensure that you have sub domains or sub folder for every state that you are targeting. You also need to make sure that your dub domain and folder should be named properly.

Incoming Links: Incoming links is also one important factor that you need to take care of. Because what majority SEO experts do is that, they use most of the link from the country’s site which is not even their target market.  For instance, if many of the links you use are from Canadian sites and your target market is in England, then Google assumes that your website is a Canadian website too.

Your Address Information: One more effective way of Geo-targeting in SEO is that, your website should contain address that is valid.

Site Registration: Registering your website on local sites like yellow pages, Google maps and yahoo local is essential.

Use of Words: There are several words that are spelled and pronounced differently in various countries. Therefore, make use of words keeping in mind the country you are targeting.

Anchor Text: Prefer mentioning your location or state in the anchor text. This might turn out to be an effective way of Geo-targeting.

Title: country that you are targeting should me mentioned in your title.

Meta Tag: Meta tag is also considered as one of the helpful ways used my many SEO experts for doing Geo-targeting.

User Behavior: User behavior is one of the new ways that is recently being recommended by many experts.
Other Tips for Geo Targeting

Every country has its own taste and choice. Therefore, choose the website design and style accordingly.
Different country users get different search results because search engines like Google and Yahoo have different versions. Therefore, your web hosting provider should be located in the country you are targeting.  
Make use of geographic Meta data in order to completely understand the behavior of the visitor.
Above mentioned are few of the effective tactics that can be applied by an SEO expert when doing projects for various clients. Following the above guidelines will improve traffic to your site and you will be able to see positive outcome soon.

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