Search engines work hard to return results listings that they anticipate will be relevant to their users and geographic location and the language of the website play big roles in this. Then there are political barriers, in which countries will block competing international companies.

Make the website more attractive to the targeted country by tailoring your content to them. An effective way to do this is to have multiple versions of the website based on location. For example, if targeting customers in the UK, create a subdomain for that geographic region (for example, http://uk.primedesignsolutions.com) and have a version of the website in that location. Then, when someone is searching using google.co.uk, the search engine can recognize that a geographically-optimized version is available.

Tailoring the content for search queries in the targeted country is a necessary step in the SEO process. Terms used for searching in the U.S. are not necessarily universal, so knowing the culture and dialect of the international customer is important. Other obvious content changes will include international contact information, elimination of career opportunity pages, etc.

Additionally, multiple language versions of the website are another way to boost foreign search rankings. When targeting Germany, having the site in German will help significantly.

There is also the standard, time-intensive task of submitting to regional search engines and directories. Finding the appropriate directories and then submitting relevant data will help build backlinks to the site and will increase credibility with foreign search engines.

Due to the fact that there are quite a few steps in getting optimized in each region, it is recommended to view each targeted area as a stand-alone campaign where you will create an optimized version of the website for that country then build credibility through submissions to the appropriate places.