How to get your site in the Google UK index

This is a question emailed in by Peter Thomson, President of Thomson Bike Tours (http://www.thomsonbiketours.com/).

Peter asks "Our company website is well ranked in Google.com and much of our business is from the US, however, we would now like to increase our focus on the UK market. My question is how do we get our site listed on Google UK?"

To answer Peter's question we first of all we need to distinguish between Google UK and Google's UK index. If you go to Google.co.uk you will see that the default search setting is 'the web'. This is basically Google's main global index and usually returns the same results as Google.com. Your site does appear in this index.

However, if I make the same search again, but this time select 'pages from the UK', your site does not appear. This is a problem for you because a relatively significant percentage of UK consumers use the 'pages from the UK' option to narrow their search. As it stands, these potential customers will not find your website in the natural search results.

To get your site in the Google UK sites only index you must have one of two things; either a .co.uk domain, or a site hosted within the UK with a UK I.P. address. A word of warning though, just because you use a UK based hosting company does not guarantee that your site is physically hosted in the UK. This is because some hosting companies use offshore servers. It's definitely worth getting assurances on this before committing to new hosting services.