Recently I have developed a site and started doing SEO for it. I have tried several tools for it like word tracker, keyword discovery, seobook etc. Usually these tools don't have locational preference settings and give results for google.com(which is global search), except for google external keyword tool(which gives both local and global) I have found that whenever I type google.com in I.E or firefox it redirects to google.co.in. If that trend is followed everywhere everyone will be seeing their own country results only. Also most of the tools (eg Rank checker for firefox) give results for US. Eg check "cheap reseller hosting" for eg site X gives it at fifties for google US at mid 20's google france and for google.co.in its a first page result and rank checker results match for google US. Now what I want to know, how can I optimise my site to rank consistently across many countries for the first page. Is there any method, because I will have to seperately know the local search results and beat the competition locally. Or should I target few countries. I am actually trying to sell a digital product and most of the targeted traffic should be Europe and US along with local. Also how you people try to go about the ranking, locally, if locally which all countries. Also I tried through a proxy google results are then based on the country in which the proxy is located. Anyway to find a global result. Most tools give Google US results.
Well more often then not, it's just best to find out which version of google has the best traffic to competition ratio form the google keyword tool. So if Slovenia has 200/day searches for "Slovenian Sausages" and 500 000 results while Ireland only has 20/day searches and 400 000 results then Slovenia would be the better choice obviously. What I would recommend is to push your site hard in google.com results and then check your rank in other SERPs later. You'll find that your higher in some then others. Say your at SERP 14 in google.com but Serp 7 in google Slovenia. Start finding pages from slovenia to link to you and you should see your rank in that country go up. This applies to other countries just as well. .ca's will boost your Canadian rank, .co.il will boost your Israeli results, etc.
Thanks Kngavl, so the way to go about is to get stats for individual countries as you suggest. Recently I downloaded an excellent tool - KeywordSpy for firefox. What it does is give you an option to search a keyword in google for different countries. Though it has option for only 17 countries but they are the major ones nevertheless. Anyone knows a tool for global search, does google have a .com search even ? Also if we use the keyword India does it help our ranking in India and rather lowers ranking in other countries. Should we then use keywords pertaining to all the relevant countries. Any other way ?
http://www.allno1.com/google_serp/multi_country_rank_checker.asp That will allow to check your serps in basically any international version of google. That page also has a 1000 serp checker. If you use the keyword India then you optimize for India as a keyword, in google.com, google.co.in, google.ca the keyword has no effect on which version of google you'll appear on. Being optimized for one type of google will not lower your rank in other versions of google. Some countries are easier to be in the top 10 then others so it looks like your doing good in those countries for the same keyword that in google you'll find yourself in 70th position. This just means that the word is not competitive in those countries and not that your google.com ranking is being affected. If you want to focus on one geographical area for the whole site, then go into webmaster tools and set your geolocation for that site. If you want certain pages/keywords to rank higher in certain countries, then as I said before get those links from those countries.