There is a difference trying to target SEO Malaysia or SEO for worldwide searches. You basically view a slightly different set of result even if you are using Google.com but searching in different parts of the world. I guess the question asked would be, “How can we target for one location?”.
My opinion is that including the location like “Malaysia” in your content would place more emphasis that you are trying to target Malaysia traffic. Also getting backlinks from other website in the same geographical location would definitely helps.
Here is how you can check if you are interested to know what US resident are seeing from a certain keyword search at Google.com.
http://www.google.com/search?q=KEYWORD&gl=US
For example, if you are searching for SEO service
http://www.google.com/search?q=SEO&gl=US
http://www.google.com/search?q=SEO&gl=MY
http://www.google.com/search?q=SEO&gl=SG
I used three different location MY=Malaysia, SG=Singapore and US=United States. I could omit the second query with &gl=MY because I would see the same result.
On top of that, you will also get a different result from Google.com.my. And sometimes it is better if you are concentrating in a regional Google. This is how you could check other country search result. If you check Alexa’s Malaysia Top 100 website, you will notice that Google.com.my gets more visitor compare to Google.com. This is because a lot of computer have default on Google.com.my when the first time Google detects IP from Malaysia and people do not change it as long as the searches works.
- Go to http://www.google.com/adpreview (without the backslash, it will not work)
- Enter the keyword
- Enter Google Domain
- Choose the country of the searches
You will see the result that is different from countries to countries.
I’m current doing SEO for my websites and your tips are very useful. Thanks man!
Horizon: glad it helped
I specialize in local search and your comments about getting backlinks from local websites based on geographics is spot on. Geographic backlinks are highly valued in google if you are targeting your local geographic area.
Many people believe meta tags are dead seo, but i have found alot of value is put on Geo Meta tags when optimizing for local search also.
This is very true. When I was just starting out in this business I got a great job from a US based company – and I was in Poland. I took the job and just after a few weeks the results were amazing – all results no.1 i both google and yahoo. The problem was, google search results were drastically different when accessed from the US and for all the keywords I only got one to the 2nd page, the rest were far behind… I managed to fix it eventually, but it took 3 times as much work ..
really informative article! thanks for sharing….
Mike: you are welcome