1. Where should I host my website?
2. Should I invest in a country specific domain name?
3. How can I build website visibility within each individual country?
4. How do I set my intended market specific to each country?
5. What differences make a difference when search engines determine which country my website is intended for?
6. How do I ensure localization?

Eric Enge from Search Engine Watch, discusses just that in this article entitled “Operating Websites in Multiple Countries“.

1. People will be typing this address into their browsers to visit your site so it needs to be easy to spell so as to avoid people not getting to the site.
2. It needs to be easy to remember so that people will not forget it.
3. Unless you are a big brand, you may wish to consider putting keywords into your domain and/or name your business appropriately to gain extra ratings from search engines.
4. Use hyphens “-” to seperate keywords in your domain name as they are treated by search engines as a space. Joining keywords together may be misinterpreted by a search engine to be a different keyword which could lead to being indexed for the wrong keyword phrase or at worst could mean something terrible. An example would be “www.therapistfinder.com” which stands for “Therapist Finder”. If read incorrectly this could in fact say “The Rapist Finder” which would clearly be a nightmare for such a company.
5. Use no more than 3 keywords seperated by two hyphens. Ideally only use one hyphen and two keywords. An example is “www.hiking-hong-kong.com”.
6. When choosing these keywords be sure to ask your local search specialist for the best keywords to use. Certain keywords will have more people searching for them – these are the keywords which you will want to choose. However it is also important to check how large a net these keywords cast. For example, if your are selling printers you may call your domain ‘printers.com’, however this keyword will have many other people competing against it and therefore be very difficult to rank for. If you sell only HP printers, then ‘hp-printers.com’ would be the more obvious choice as it is more specific and will therefore be easier to rank highly for in search engines.
7. Choose the right extension. The most popular extension are the top level domains such as ‘.com’, ‘.net’ or ‘.org’. Other domains such as ‘.info’, ‘.asia’ or ‘.hk’ may be more difficult to remember.
8. Are you based in a specific country? Using the contry domain extension will help you rank higher within that country if you only offer your services or goods within that country and to those who reside there. For example you should use ‘yourdomain.com.hk’ rather than ‘yourdomain.com’ to rank higher on the local search engines for Hong Kong.