I’ve recently become very interested in search engine optimization. It’s quite an interesting field as it’s always growing and changing. Like most other fields, you’ll really have to follow a lot of blogs/forums in order to keep up to date.

A question that I’ve recently been asking myself quite a bit is whether we should launch international versions of FluidSurveys… i.e. fluidsurveys.ca, fluidsurveys.co.uk, etc… The primary reason for this pondering, of course, is because FluidSurveys currently ranks very well in Canada but not as well in the United States. It’s interesting because we have offices in the US and Canada and we target users in both countries. In terms of our customer base, we have customers all over the world…

So the question is, why do we rank so well in Canada and not so well in the US?

From what I’ve been able to gather, this primarily has to do with the fact that most of the backlinks that we have pointing to the website come from Canada and our webservers are located in Canada. It seems very weird that search engines should even care where a site is hosted. I always figured that people would host their websites wherever they could find good service… Why should someone have to host their website in the UK if they want to rank well there. Although, I can’t be certain that this is a determining factor, I hope that it isn’t…

In terms of Top Level Domains, yes we do own some international domains but we have them all pointing to the .com (permanent redirects). All of our backlinks are to the .com as well so those domain names shouldn’t play much of a factor.

But, backlinks can’t be the only factor though… it wouldn’t make sense since search engines would still have to determine which countries the backlinks belonged to… I suppose top level domains are one of the ways that search engines can figure out which countries those backlinks are coming from… I think that the one remaining factor is content… I think that the content on the domains probably plays a major role here as well…

So, if I had to summarize, I would have to say that the most important factors in ranking well internationally (in order) would be:

1) Content in Your Website (name of country, name of city, language)
2) Meta Tags (i.e. specifying language)
3) Backlinks from Websites from your Country
4) Top Level Domains
5) Location of Your Server

Again, there is no way to know for sure unless of course someone from Google/Microsoft would like to weigh in…

Aydin.