By now, everyone's heard of google. Most people realize they also have locale-specifc sites (Spanish, German, UK, etc.) too, however unless you live in one of those locales that probably doesn't matter much.

If you go to the UK-specific version of Google, you will see an option that reads "pages from the UK". How exactly do you get listed in those results? This would only be useful, of course, if you were physically located in the UK and wanted to be found in those results - but if you are, this type of search would be invaluable. This applies to any locality as well, not just the UK. If you live in Spain, you'd want to be listed in those results for the Spanish Google page.

A user posed this question recently (he managed to resolve the issue, and has posted an update), and we did a little research (some links for your reference can be found in the Reference Links section below this post). Basically, there are two primary things you can/should do to be listed in your locale-specific search results. Note, also, this does not mean at all that you will be removed from the regular searches, just listed in the locale-specific searches in addition.

Your site's IP address matters! Google uses IP geolocation to determine where your site is. In other words, if you want to be listed in UK-only search results, you should be hosted in the UK. Even if your host is "in the UK", if the IP address resolves to the United States, for example, Google does not now that you are in the UK. Google for "free ip geolocation" and you'll find many tools that will let you enter in an IP address to determine where it's located - enter in your site's IP address and verify it shows the correct country. If not, realistically the only thing you can do in this situation is to move to a new host. This can be troublesome, but it can be very much worth it. If you were a UK resident searching for "video game rental", it's quite probable you only want to see local results. If you have the largest video game rental store in the UK, but no one can find you because local searches don't pull up your website, this can severely impact visibility and sales.

Your TLD matters too! Your TLD is the part after your domain name: i.e. ".com", ".net", or in this case ".co.uk". Having a ".co.uk" TLD, even while hosting in another country, appears to influence Google in terms of your locale-specific searches. It can be a nightmare for an established site to change their TLD, so weigh this option carefully - it is usually much much easier to simply move your site from one host to another, however if that is not possible you can consider changing the domain name to match your locality. Just make sure to 301 redirect all of the old links to the new links.