Getting organic search engine traffic is almost certainly the hardest part of running a blog. Ideas, posts and articles might come easy, but search traffic is quite another matter.
Most potential bloggers decide upon a .com or .net domain name when they first decide to start a blog, but is this the best option? Sometimes it isn’t. There are times when a country specific domain would be more suitable.
Take this example – Joe Blogger has a new blog, before parting with his cash he did the right thing and checked out a few hosting comparison websites to see which companies were offering the best deals, he read a few blog posts on recommended web hosting companies and made notes about his findings. After a few hours he found a company that came in at a price he could afford. He signed up and bought a hosting package and a lovely domain name with a .com extension. He thought this would be the best way to go as he was new to this blogging lark and just wanted to get writing.
After many months of blogging Joe Blogger had become disappointed with the amount of visitors his blog was getting from the country he was targeting. In this case the UK. He couldn’t really figure out what the problem was; the blog was well written, had lots of original content and was well designed.
Then he stumbled upon a post in a forum which made him think about the physical set up of his blog. He had bought the hosting and domain from a company based in the US, so he contacted the company to ask about the geographic location of the server hosting his blog. They said it was in New York. This information triggered this question “If the server hosting my blog is in America and I have a .com domain, how do search engines know I am targeting a UK based audience?”
The answer is – they don’t.
In the above scenario Joe Blogger would have been better off buying a domain name ending in .co.uk as this would ensure listings in the google.co.uk search engine. The domain extension would not stop it from being listed in google.com (or other Google search engines) if the content is good enough.
If you already have an established blog/site and you think this problem might be affecting your results, there is something you can do about it that would not involve buying new hosting or setting up redirects, the only problem is, the solution is not guaranteed to work.
If you own a gTLD (generic top level domain) such as .com, .net, .org or .info and want to target a specific country you can use a function within Google’s Webmaster Tools to tell Google which country or geolocation your blog is targeting.
This is how to set it up:
Log into GWT, click on the site you want to use, click on Site Configuration and then Settings. The top section is Geographic Target – tick the box and select the country (from the drop down menu) you want to target. Save.
You can only select a geographic target for a generic top level domain (.com, .net etc), if your domain ends in a country specific extension, the default setting is the associated country and you cannot change it.
This solution won’t work overnight, in fact, it may not even work at all, but it is worth giving it a go if your site is struggling.
