For a generic domain say www.purplecola.com where the company is based in India (IP address there too), how should they best optimize for US search traffic?

[Sundance_Kidd]

Let's just say that they want to target the US market.  Should they add a US based IP address? Would love to hear insight from people who have managed this, experienced this or have expertise. Obviously, a US based physical address would help.  Thanks!!

Chris

[Highland]

A US address would help, but only in the sense of latency. If you're hosting in India and I'm in the US, that means the data has to literally travel halfway around the world and back again. With the cheap cost of virtualization (cloud) hosting, that just doesn't make sense if you're trying to target the US market. So i would physically host in the US for that reason. If you still need to target an Indian market, I would get a ccTLD .in domain (i.e. purplecola.in) and host locally for that as well.

Beyond that, breaking into the US market should be simple. Your two things to keep in mind are

1. Proper localization. This is more crucial since you're in India. There's a tendency for Indian companies (especially in the tech support industry) to try and pretend they're American. I've had Indian phone tech support tell me their name is Bob and it's just not believable (tell me your real name or it looks like you're trying to hide something in plain sight). This goes double for your SEO content because there are LOTS of Indian companies trying to sell American content that is not really American localized. You need your content to look and read American because you don't want bad localization.
2. Once your content is good, go get some American links. This will send a strong geolocation signal that you're a US focused site. You should already have Webmaster Tools set to the US anyways.

[max.favilli]

I agree with you.

But let me just add something.

New Delhi to New York is 12.000 km, that's around 120ms of latency. While within India it's probably in the 3 to 15 ms range.

1. TTFB should be below 500ms to be in a safe zone, that 120ms leaves 380ms for everything else, is definitely doable,

2. each http request made from the browser is going to be affected by the latency, but for a long list of good reasons the website should be optimized reducing the number of request necessary to render pages,

3. to improve performance reducing latency a CDN is the thing to use, duplicating content around the world on different physical or virtual machines with the purpose of improving performance, still make sense, but only if your traffic is epic.

[gfiorelli1]

Given all the other geotargeting factors are fine, using a domain name whose IP is from USA would be a good added signal.

Remember, you don't necessarily need to have your site hosted in the USA for having a USA IP.