The location of where your website is hosted plays a part in the ranking of your website. This isn’t the sole reason as there are hundreds of factors that go in the search engine algorithms. To make it simple, if you want to rank well in Google UK then it very much helps to have a website hosted in the UK. For this reason the three most popular countries for web hosting are:

1) USA
2) UK
3) India

Leading the way is the USA as everyone wants to rank well on google.com. There is a certain prestige and great traffic that comes with this ranking. If this is your main target as an SEO it’s critical to have website hosting from the USA. Other SEO aspects that will help are getting links from other websites hosted and registered with a USA address. Getting associated with these other websites via links helps search engines place you in the same neighborhood and similar status.

It is possible to have hosting for a different country and to rank well on google.com but it is more difficult to do. If possible and you are trying to target a specific country, get the domain name with the country code extension. In the UK .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk are the most popular and in India .in, co.in, .net.in, .org.in, .gen.in, .firm.in, .ind.in are the popular domain extensions. If you don’t think having a country specific domain name helps check out how many of the top websites have them for their respected country.

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