I have a solution the the question I asked last September -
which country do the search engines think we are in?. It seems that Google takes the top level domain name if it's geographic ... and otherwise it uses the IP address of the server to give it guidance. But there's another was of tuning this, which is in the webmaster tools. See
here. However, Google's page tells us that this only effects ranking on advanced searches where the user calls up for certain countries only.
Up until Summer, 2008 our server was located in the USA and our top level domain - .net - gave no clue that we were primarily UK / European. At a move of server (we needed to be on a dedicated server anyway with our traffic levels and need for flexibility), we chose a hosting company who have their computers in London, partly to get fast local responses with the trans Atlantic lag and partly to appear to be in the UK. And it was noticeable that the proportion of UK:USA traffic changed, and in the right direction too.
As a further (final) stage, we've altered that Google setting ... and I'm glad that we've solved something that was quite tricky to find the answers on!
Diagram shows where current traffic to our web site originates from. See
source code and
resultant graphic from our example of visits from Europe. Subject covered on our
PHP techniques workshop (written 2009-01-02, updated 2009-01-05)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
G911 - Well House Consultants - Search Engine Optimisation [165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
[427] The Melksham train - a button is pushed - (2005-08-28)
[1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
[1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
[1344] Catching up on indexing our resources - (2007-09-10)
[1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
[1969] Search Engines. Getting the right pages seen. - (2009-01-01)
[1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
[1984] Site24x7 prowls uninvited - (2009-01-10)
[2000] 2000th article - Remember the background and basics - (2009-01-18)
[2019] Baby Caleb and Fortune City in your web logs? - (2009-01-31)
[2045] Does robots.txt actually work? - (2009-02-16)
[2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
[2106] Learning to Twitter / what is Twitter? - (2009-03-28)
[2107] How to tweet automatically from a blog - (2009-03-28)
[2137] Reaching the right people with your web site - (2009-04-23)
[2324] What search terms FAIL to bring visitors to our site, when they should? - (2009-08-05)
[2330] Update - Automatic feeds to Twitter - (2009-08-09)
[2428] Diluting History - (2009-09-27)
[2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
[2562] Tuning the web site for sailing on through this year - (2010-01-03)
[2686] Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers - (2010-03-20)
[2748] Monitoring the success and traffic of your web site - (2010-05-01)
[3670] Reading Google Analytics results, based on the relative populations of countries - (2012-03-24)
[3746] Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law - (2012-06-02)
[4121] Has your Twitter feed stopped working? Switching to their new API - (2013-06-23)
Some other Articles
Well House Manor Hotel - on plan for 2009 business guestsMoving a directory on your web siteRequired RequestPettifog and forum boards away from public viewTelling Google which country your business trades inPlagarism - who is copying my pages?Review of 2008LinkedIn - Thrice Asked, and joined.Background to the TransWilts Train Fiasco