The recent Searchnomics 2007 reveled one more important SEO factor that will help you beat the competition on the search engine ranks page. In fact, it was known earlier, but to hear it from a googler definitely makes sense.

Shashi Thakur - a googler who spoke at the conference admitted that - The location of your server too decides where you rank on the SERP’s.

Suppose you have a .co.uk domain. When your site ranks for a particular keyword on the Google UK search engine, it has a priority over a .com domain provided that your site is optimized well for the keyword.

Elsewhere(Google international) it may rank below a .com domain for the same keyword. Here is an example to illustrate the same.

1 - SERPS for the term “stock photography” on Google.co.uk

2 - SERPS for the term “stock photography” on Google.com

Notice how alamy.com ranks number 1 on google.co.uk for the search term “stock photography” while it’s not at the top 3 on google.com?

The reason is that Alamy.com has it’s servers in UK, so it has an edge over others on Google.co.uk So, it’s clear that Google takes into consideration your server location, while delivering results on local/regional search engines, in a significant way that is!