Ranking Well on Google Regional

Say i need to rank well on google.co.uk then what is it that is recommended by you to achieve this, or say google.fr for instance.

My point is if i need to target UK or USA, how do i tweak my campaigns to be able to do well in these areas.

IMHO the most important thing you should do is gain backlinks from sites hosted in the countires you are tarketing.

Dont confuse this with the .com .co.uk domain issue, but where they are actually hosted.

I will suggest to think ten time before working to rank will on local, cause if you want to work on the local you will need to:
1- Host your website on UK server
2- Sign up a UK domain and make sure that UK set as country in your WHOIS
3- Get some UK inbound links

Trade off IMO is negative:
You will rank will in Google.co.uk and I am not sure if Google automatically forward all users from UK to Google.co.uk , BUT
It is going to be very hard to rank well in Yahoo.com and MSN.com where those don't forward their visitors to their local search

So if things will stay like now I will recommend you to stick with Global and forget about Local, if your audiences are UKs you will eventually rank well in the local without doing any extra things ;)

Let me correct this, say when I search for a term like "seo services" in google.com from india, i get a result where say i rank in top 10, now when the same search is conducted from UK in google.com the results are different by 20 positions. How can i improve that.

Good question, I am waiting more replays for that before I tell my experience with this issue

I'm "on" G.ie and recently looked at "web design" on the various English language Gs, not only did the SERPs differ so too did the allinanchor results; nothing concrete, but it looks to me as if local links/anchor text are getting a boost.

Another thing, a while back an Irish site would never have featured for a generic term in the "web search" results, now they do.
It's looks completely random though, there one day gone the next, for one search term but not another, no apparent rhyme or reason to it.

The key to a regional google is mainly the backlinks, but being hosted in the region helps to.

The regional googles contain all the same results as google.com from what i can see, it's just that they order differently, with a local bias when it makes sense.

I find that the best thing is to have a significant amount of anchor texts have the region in it. ie i am only interested in Hong Kong (and some other parts of asia for the future) so many of my backlinks anchor text contain the words hong kong or HK. Works well for me. I get a lot of traffic about other hong kong topics as well as the terms i ma targeting.