Ranking in Google and your website's IP address.

Ranking in Google and your website's IP address.If your website targets the US, then your hosts web servers should be located in the US. If your website targets the UK, then your hosts data centers should be located in the UK. Webmasters ignoring this Google rule will find out that they will not be able to rank high in country specific Google search engines like Google.com or Google.com/webhp (engines for the US) or Google.co.uk (engine for the UK). At cqcounter.com you can check what the country location (IP address) of your web site is. The result should match the country you are targeting. If there's no match, then I recommend you to choose another website hosting service.Google Webmaster Tools.Geographic settings in your Google Webmaster Tools Account will not help you to resolve this problem. These settings are only in effect when a searcher selects the "Pages From" option in Google's search engine. The problem is that only few searchers do this.Domain name extension.Another factor for Google to determine the country of your website is your TLD (domain name extension). If your target is the US then a .com, .net, .us, .biz etc. will do the job for you. If you target the UK, then .co.uk should be used. Not following these rules will also have a negative impact on your rankings in google.com, google.com/webhp, or google.co.uk. If you made this mistake then I recommend you to perform a new domain name search.Registration Period.You can register your domain for one year only. But the question is: is that smart? I don't think so, because, if you register for such a short period, Google will consider you as one of the many fly by night sites that will disappear soon! And, again, that will have a negative impact on your ranking. So always register your domain for at least two years!Keywords in URL.Messages in the Google Forum clearly indicate, that, if keywords or a keyword phrase in your domain name, are an exact match of what a searcher is asking for, your ranking will get a boost to the top! Moreover, Google has become very efficient in extracting keywords from URLs in order to increase relevance for its searchers. And then we don't even talk about sites linking to yours by using your URL only, which happens very often. And Google will rank you higher if the keywords are in your URL in links pointing to you, or in the anchor text in links pointing to your website.Sunmmary of mistakes.So let's resume what can go wrong:1) The web servers of your host are not located in your target country.2) You have a domain name extension that does not belong to the country your website is targeting.3) You registered your domain for one year only.4) There are no keywords in your domain.The solution.Don't be worried that you will loose your search rank, your pagerank and your link popularity, if you change your domain name. Simply redirect your page with a permanent 301 redirect, wait a few weeks and voila, all your popularity and rankings are restored for the full 100 percent! More information on Google friendly redirecting can be found at www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633. See you in the Top!