I have a .co.uk website that performs well in the UK but I want to set up a .com copy of the site to get ranked in other countries, particularly the US. Does anyone have experience of doing this and can you give me advice on what I have to be wary about, e.g. Does the textual content of the .com site need to be unique to avoid duplicate content penalties? If I do link from the existing .co.uk site to the .com site will it help raise the ranking of the .com site in the US or will it be treated as a UK/ non-relevant link? Using a linking strategy on the original .co.uk site I have inner pages with a rank only 1 less than the homepage even though the internal pages have no external links. All pages turn up well in SERPs. Can I extend the .co.uk linking strategy to the the homepage of the .com site to give it a quick boost before building external links to the .com? Any help would be appreciated.
First, I would make the sites not identical if possible. I would keep them some what the same layout and design but with unique things between the both of them. Try to write different content if possible, you be suprised how many different ways you can re-write and explain 5 to 10 paragraphs of content. Then, concentrate on building backlinks from the US geo-graphical area, also use geo-targeting inside Google Webmasters Central, due to currency conversions it's a great benefit for you right now to also host the site within the US.