I made the bad mistake of thinking that the servers for 1&1.co.uk were actually in the UK [which is what I wanted for my UK business], however have recently discovered that they are in Germany! I am now contemplating moving servers, but how important is it from a SEO point of view that the server should be in the country of the business? [I have a .com address for a UK located business.] Thanks.
I don't think that it makes a massive amount of difference, but yes it will help. A good structured website, well optimised and good content will help it even more. But I have heard that hosting in the country that you are targeting does help. The only thing is, UK hosting isn't cheap! I have one server in the UK and one in the States - not much difference between the two except for price!!!
well if you have .com address for UK business then u dont need to worry about server but if you have .co.uk then u must worry also for geo targetting, set in google webmaster tool the country focus Also one more thing if u r targetting the uk customers go for co.uk domain
I wouldn't worry about the .com name - .com is for company and it can be based anywhere. There server location doesn't make much difference. In the past it would have affected speed, but now the transfer rate is so quick the improvement is barely noticeable. There are other ways for Google to tell where your company is based, mainly from the content of the site. You can also get a listing in Google local.
I agree, there is probably a difference between very far countries, but Germany is near to UK, so the difference would not be noticeable.
Most of the websites I use are based in the US and the page load times are almost instant. I have a UK site which is hosted in Denmark and I have had no problems with SEO. A lot of people say you should use the local TLD, but again search engines no longer use these to locate a site as so many people use the TLD that looks best. This will become even more evident as the new TLDs become more common.