I purchased buytomtom.net recently with the intention to target the UK market. Initally I had intended for .co.uk but that was already taken so i went with the .net. This is appearing about 4th in Google.com resuls but when searching (worldwide) on google.co.uk my site appears nowhere for the 'buy tomtom' keyword. How can there be such a difference and will the .net site ever make it on the UK search engine. Please not im not targetting when the user searches just UK results on Google but the Google.co.uk website. any tips would be welcome.
where is the site hosted? i have some similar things happening with a couple of mobile phone sites. in the US searches they appear quite high up but not in the uk ones. including UK in your url's may be a help and also using UK in the keywords you use as anchor text but i think UK based hosting is going to be a deciding factor also. i am moving my sites this week.
The country TLD is the strongest indicator ,others are place of hosting, backlinks ( country specific), Webmasters tools set country preference,language, also Matt Cutts recently suggested using a specific directory example http://mydomain.com/uk/