.com Domain in google.co.uk

Marketing
1

I have both a .com and a .co.uk domain. The .co.uk forwards to the .com domain.

I have a couple of questions:

  1. My company will be based in the uk but I have descided to use the .com domain as the primary one. When building backlinks should I just focus on the .com domain or should I link to the .co.uk domain as well so I can rank in the google.co.uk results pages?

  2. If I set my site to be UK based in Google webmaster will this be as good as having a .co.uk domain when searching google.co.uk? For example will .co.uk domains almost always rank higher than my .com domain in the google.co.uk search results? For some long tail keywords the competition is really low (new site, pr1, <100 weak backlinks) but I’ve noticed that most of the results on page 1 of the serp are .co.uk. Do I have any chance of beating them with a .com in google.co.uk?

Thanks!

2

Too many questions to answer there which may not actually help you choose the right international strategy.

Try reading through these to see if it helps any:
* http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/06/which-domain-internationalisation-strategy-to-use.html
* http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/making-geotargeted-content-findable-for-the-right-searchers/
* http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/Geo-targeting-Kingons-film-at-11.html

3

perfect…those links answered my questions and a few others that I had.

Thanks.