How to improve your search engine rankings in Singapore
Search engine rankings in Singapore and other local search engines can be easier to achieve than in Google.com or Yahoo.com but you have to ensure that the search engines see your site and your content as relevant for the local Singapore market or which ever local market space you are wanting to show up in.
Prospective clients often ask us to rank them in Google so we ask them to clarify if they mean Google.com or Google.com.sg or Google.com.au etc. Google has over 260 different local search engines with everything from Google St Helena to Google Kazakhstan with all your standard country versions in between.
Improve search engine rankings
Showing up in a local search engine and improving your search engine rankings in countries such as Singapore (Google.com.sg) is easier if you do the following :
- use a local domain name such as .com.sg or .sg site (or your local equivalent for example : .com.au or .co.nz)
- host your site on a locally based server so that your website IP address is tied to the country where you want to show up in Google
- tell Google (using webmaster tools www.google.com/webmaster – login using your Gmail A/C) that your site is localised to the country where you want to show up eg Singapore
If you do any of the above then you will often rank higher in the local Google.com search pages.
How to increase search engine rankings in Singapore if you DON’T have any of the above in place
If you run your site through a .com, .net or .org then you have to make a CLEAR decision about the physical location of your market space. So for example, we started our SEO service in Singapore but we now serve clients globally. Right now we have a problem. We are one of the leading top three search engine optimization (SEO) companies in Singapore, we are No3 right now in Pages from Singapore, which we have held tightly for nearly two years, and up to recently we were showing as the No3 SEO company in Pages from the Web as well.
Right now, just this week, two competitors have pushed us down in pages from the web. We’re ‘anchored’ to Singapore inside Google Webmaster Tools, despite running our site through a .com domain. We have been debating in our team if we should ‘un-anchor’ ourselves from Singapore and take our chances in the .com world.
The decision for us is easy seeing we have two years of content and activity that tie us to Singapore and our web domain is hosted in Singapore. So seeing our competitors are now taking our spots we will let go of our Webmaster tools tie to Singapore this coming week.
If you are new to the web and your site has not been around for very long, and even though you have a .com but your physical business comes from a specific single country, then we would suggest that you anchor yourself initially to a local country (helps build business and local traffic), and then later on release yourself, and take the plunge into the .com world.
Search engine rankings recovery
If you release yourself from being tied to a localized country within Google Webmaster tools, once you release yourself from that local tie, be prepared to do two or three months solid SEO ranking work because your SEO ranking position may become compromised.
Letting go of being tied to a specific country domain inside Google Webmaster tools is a bit like being the captain of a ship that has always sailed in the Mediterranean Sea deciding to set sail for South America : The seas ahead will be a lot rougher than you are used to but if you keep your head about you all will be OK and you will become a better captain from the experience. The pay off of not being tied to local search engine rankings is that you can start to show up in other countries search results once you have added more depth to your SEO ‘footprint’ – this will allow you to start servicing a global market. So yes you may lose a little in your old local playing ground but you will gain more in the long-term from a bigger market space – a global one…
