Domain Names, Hosting & Registration details - how to get it right!

January 31st, 2008 | by Peter Cullen |

Does it matter what your website is called? What about where you’re hosted or where you registered your website from? Surely its all about what’s on your website - the content and not where its hosted or what its called? Right?

OK, so lets say that you live in Spain and that you buy a domain name called www.spainish-ornaments.com. Now you registered your new domain name using your business address in Spain and you setup your business web hosting in Spain.

You plan to sell Spanish ornments on your website and one of your target markets is Germany. You localise parts of the website for German speakers and feel that most Germans speak English anyway, so your website is in 3 languages, Spanish, German and mainly English.

Now, what are the chances of your website earning a good ‘organic’ ranking on Google.de?

Lets, put it another way. How does Google or Yahoo or Live determine if your website is relevant for a particular search in a particular country?

Well, one of the first things they look at is the IP of the searcher. If the searcher is located in the UK, then the results sent back to the SERP (search engine results page) will have a bias towards a particular country. So in this instance, Google looks at where websites are registered from, where they are hosted and is they have an cctld (country code top level domain, e.g. .co.uk, .ie, .fr, .de) or tld (.com. .net).

So what criteria should you follow when registering and hosting a new domain name?

  1. Know what your target country is
  2. Register a domain main of .com or .net or your cctld, e.g. www.exampe.co.uk or www.example.fr
  3. When you are registering your domain be sure to use an address in your target country
  4. Host the new website in your target country

The above guidelines are best case scenario. There are alternative methods of targeting specific countries, for example:

  • use paid advertising to target a country
  • use Google webmasters to tell Google your target country
  • Use IP recognition to serve appropriate country targeted pages

All the above alternative strategies will definitely not be a successful as points 1-4. Remember, targeting organic traffic you are looking to influence the search and they always look for the most relevant results.


  1. 3 Responses to “Domain Names, Hosting & Registration details - how to get it right!”

  2. By UK domain names on Jul 12, 2008 | Reply

    I suffered from a similar problem. I registered a .com and hosted it with oneandone.co.uk. I assumed they were in the UK, but they actually host in Germany. I actually appear higher in google.de than in google.co.uk. When I moved it to the UK, within a few weeks it appeared in the UK results and appeared a lot higher in google.com as well.

  3. By UK domain names on Jul 12, 2008 | Reply

    I’ve got a website (http://www.domainnamesoup.com) to help people find available domain names. I hope you find it useful.

  4. By Walter on Jul 31, 2008 | Reply

    Also use makewords.com. Not quite as good as it was before they were bought, but I always get good ideas from them. It’s worth a quick look for idea generation if you are stuck.

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