#1 Register the country domain name extension for the market you are targetting. ie. If you have a .co.uk domain you will get listed in the Google UK search results #2 Rent web servers which use an IP address from the market you are targetting. ie. If you are hosted on UK servers you will get listed in the Google UK search results Would anyone like to add to this? What about with regard to backlinks? If you get enough country specific links, will this get you listed in the local results with a .com and USA hosting? If so, how many links would you need?
I would say if you are targetting .co.uk then you should get same kind of backlinks too. Though i personally from my experiance feel there is no need to buy a local targetted TLD as any .tld would get you the serps
Links are very important. You need to get backlinks from other sites related to your locality. I assume that if this link contains the name of the city or country Search Engines will know that your website is from that community. Another factor to consider is on-site SEO, you should mention the locality in the content of the site, maybe even put a mailing address in the footer.
I feel hosting does not matter though thats just my experiance with many of my websites hosted in US & Australia and sites rank well in other countries like google.co.in, google.pk etc
I agree hosting locally isn't essential, that's why I opt for a local TLD domain. I am trying to establish if onpage SEO or country specific links would be sufficient.
I always feel local serps are very easy because they dont have much competition and basically not much webmasters/seo's competition