The website design company I deal will recently had a client, who, like most people when choosing a domain name, chose a .com domain name as it makes the company sound bigger than a .co.uk.



The cheapest hosting he could find was a German based hosting company. What this meant is that the search engines seen his company as a German based company targeting global results, so his website was not ranked in Google when people searched for "pages from the UK".



This particular client made it clear to us he did not want to trade outside the UK, and he needed to rank in Google for "pages from the UK", So their first step was to move his hosting to the UK and transfer his site to a .co.uk domain.



This knowledge enabled them to quickly get the client Google rankings for "pages from the UK", which highlights why the expert knowledge that they possess can be the difference between being on the first page of Google and not existing in Google at all.



Another important factor here was that, although the new site location was on the .co.uk domain, he retained the .com and simply pointed it to the new site address meaning he got the best of both worlds.



It’s also important to find out what type of hosting you have. For example, most of the cheapest hosts are cheap because they use shared hosting. This means that your site may be hosted on the same server as literally thousands of others.
This can have several issues such as slower loading time, and from an SEO perspective if there are other sites that have been penalised by the search engines then this can have a negative effect on the other sites on the server.



Next thing is your domain name - If you are just starting out and are choosing a domain name then it can help to have a keyphrase within the domain name if possible without being spammy. To achieve this they used a 301 redirect. Basically what a 301 redirect does is tell search engines that to permanently associate you old domain with your new one,



If you are looking for an ecommerce website I strongly recommend these guys as the helped me with my Website Rating and improved the overall visibility of my website.



Factors like this echo real life business practices, the reason that the search engines give this importance is that: if you have had a website for a period of time then it has some standing with the search engines; just like new businesses struggle against existing businesses until they become established.