SEO Tips and Tricks - Online Marketing Strategy

You’ve done everything right, your site is still not showing up in Google searches after several months, and you can’t figure out why. It could be your IP location – specifically the country in which the server that hosts your web site is located.

You want your site hosted in the country you are targeting. So if your site is about real estate in the United States, that is where you want your server to be located. However, if you’re selling condos in Japan, then your site should be hosted in Japan. When a search engine returns results one of the factors it checks, to know what country’s results to serve up, is where the server is located.

The problem is some USA companies have servers in other countries, specifically Canada. In fact, GoDaddy just opened up a Canadian facility.

For that matter, with the global nature of the Internet, you may not even be aware of what country your host company itself is actually located in.

To find out your IP location, go to Domain Tools and type in your URL. Down toward the middle of the page you’ll see this section:

Server Data

Server Type:
Apache/2.0.61 (Unix) PHP/4.4.7 mod_ssl/2.0.61 OpenSSL/0.9.7e mod_fastcgi/2.4.2 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2

IP Address:
123.45.9.78

IP Location
– California – South Lake Tahoe – New Dream Network Llc

Response Code:
200

Blacklist Status:
Clear

Domain Status:
Registered And Active Website

This tells me my server is located in the USA, California specifically. But if it was located in Canada my site would not show up in USA Google searches.

I did a little checking for an Active Rain reader whose dynamic real estate site just wasn’t ranking, and discovered his site was hosted in Canada. His site may have ranked well in in that country, but that sure wasn’t helping him with the local searches he needed!