Yep, Will and Duncan gave a great presentation on that this last week in Seattle. Very interesting stuff if you are targeting multiple geo locations or languages.

For more info on that ICBM for anyone that hasn’t hurt of that check out this nice page:
Wiki On Geotagging

Do you know if Google place any significance on the many forms of “geo” meta tag or even the old “ICBM” tag?

I’m sure you will see this anyway, but Will Critchlow just posted on SEOmoz about this very issue, plus some specific info about having different US and UK sites, and the dangers of geotargeted IP cloaking (summary: all the big search engines’ spiders have a US-based IP address!)

Affiliate links can pass link juice if they are done directly to the merchant’s page or using a 301 redirect.

Good choice of theme!

Acquiring good links can be tricky so thanks for publishing a few suggestions. As a couple of the suggestions require a reciprocal link back (and I also spotted a few direct to merchant affiliate links too!) I wonder if they actually pass much juice? Still, if they manage to pass visitors it can’t be bad.

Agree with botw.org and blogs.botw.org too.

Even though wikipedia links are nofollowed I think suitably placed links out are still worthwhile because you get traffic from them.

1. I don’t think having your IP go back to the UK is vital if you are using a .co.uk. It might help a little bit but it sounds like Google is going to clearly see you are UK specific due to all the other factors. What might be a more important reason is if your site is aimed purely at UK visitors you are going to want the access times to not have the delay of going to the USA. Fiber is fast but it still adds a bit more delay for the request to have to cross the Atlantic and back.

Also, an easy way to test how big a factor this is in your niche (as it varies) is to do a search on google.co.uk some keywords. So if you are selling pet supplies in the UK search for “Pet Supplies”. Then take the top 10 or 20 sites and do a whois.sc on the domain and record how many of them are using UK hosting and a .co.uk. That is a good indication if in your niche it is a more important factor than in general.

If you want send me an email and I can suggest a few UK hosting providers who offer Drupal (which is a great CMS).

2. A lot of the bigger directories have a region specific section so that won’t be too much of a factor. Personally I only do a few directories to start out with and this depends on the niche, if I’m doing a pet supply store I might submit to botw.org (best of the web), yahoo directory, and then a few pet specific directories.

The quality of a directory is important to gauge in order to make sure its still worth while apply for a submission, here is a nice guide on how to check the quality and a list of about 40 they recommend:

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001583.shtml

In terms of the UK I think the Yahoo UK directory is a great one and dmoz’s UK section. Here are a few others that might be good:

http://directory.internetbusiness.co.uk/
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/links/
http://www.business-directory-uk.co.uk/
http://www.b2bindex.co.uk/
http://www.business.com/

Just a few suggestions, check them out before you use them and try to list in the ones specific to your niche which will be a lot more useful for users too.

Thanks for the article, it’s great to see a UK perspective on SEO and marketing. A couple of questions, if I may?

1. How important do you think UK hosting is? We have a .co.uk domain, but we’re using a US hosting service (mainly because we’re planning to use Drupal CMS, and our hosting provider specialises in suporting that system).

2. What directories (in addition to Google Local) would you recommend registering with, from a UK perspective? For example, I’ve seen people say it’s worth paying for Yahoo directory listing, but not sure if that advice related to US or global sites

Thanks, Jon