If hosting locations does affect your Internet marketing efforts, then by how much?

Ok, this question pops up every now and again. Lets look at the search engines perspective.

If you are based in the UK and want to sell in the UK (blue widgets etc) but your website is hosted in USA, then the search engines are going to give a certain amount of preference to websites that are hosted in the UK.

This makes sense as you don’t want bogus shop sellers from lets say Africa, getting all the page 1 listings pretending to be based in the UK? The answer is no of course!

So next time you are taking SEO in to consideration when choosing a hosting provider, think about it!