I have a few questions about searches made from outside the US - hopefully this one is an easy one for some of you...

I need to know how searches (in this case, using Google) are handled from outside the country -- for example, in India.

If a specific keyword is searched for in the US, and also in India, how will the results returned vary? I have used Google India, but I don't know if that's the same, especially when I'm using english.

The heart of this question really is - What more do you need to do SEO-wise in order to assure you are ranking well in other specific countries? I have looked around but am having trouble finding any info on the subject.

Thanks in advance,

Searches will change from one center to an other and of course from one contry to the other. When I optimize for english stuff I set my google toolbar to search google.com if I optimize for french, then I set my toolbar to use google.fr the results are not the same for many reasons.

The DC seved for france and for quebec will not be the same all the time, so the results will not be the same. The first thing is the language use for the google interface that will make the results change. Searching on .com and .fr for the same term that is spelled the same in both language will not give the same results, because my site has more french stuff then my english competitors, I'm #1 on .fr

An other thing is the pages picked on .com and .fr that will be different, had home being ranked on .com and a subpage on .fr so even the page served may be different. So you have no choice, you have to look at 20 different things and may have to use 2 pages to satisfy 2 different locations.

If a product is super hot in the UK but not bad one the rest, then maybe hosting your site in the UK can help you there, but it wont for the other locations... but you have no choice but to follow your product on the different countries.

This is one reason I don't really use tools to find my listings on G, they often make the request on a precise DC and since it might not be the one used in your or the other country, you endup being mislead... I for long tought I was #3 for a hot french key... but that was on google.com. The traffic did not follow the #3 improvement and found I was on the 4th page on google.fr... it kind of changed the way I do my follow up on things. Did my log analyzer to split the google.com, google.fr, google.be ... so I could tell where I do good with what page...

No magic trick but to research and work on pages that do good on specific DCs...