If you are a business with presence in multiple countries you might as well be considering to have web presence in these different geographic areas. Often businesses when trying to have websites across multiple geographies/countries implement half baked practices or have dilemmas prevailing.  Here are some of the best practices geo-targeting from SEO perspective.

a) Get a country specific TLD (top level domain).  So for example if you sell ipods have www.ipoddiscount.com for the US and www.ipoddiscount.co.uk for United Kingdom.  This is a big indicator to the search engines that your domain is targeted to that
specific country.

b) Physical Location of Server - While this might sound a little expensive it is worth the effort. Try to host the different country specific TLDs in different servers that are physically located in those country. So make sure that www.ipoddiscount.co.uk is hosted in the UK. Search engines are smart enough to figure out where your domain's IP address is located.

c) Language - Use the local dialect for your targeted geography. A common mistake that is often committed by many businesses is that they would typically serve the same content in all English speaking countries. The british don't use "zs" as much as the american's do. So for example if you promote a website that offers "search engine optimisation" targeting american clientelle you are going to look pretty silly. Contextual English in UK is widely different from English in USA. Similarly English has also got its own nature in other countries like Australia, India etc. Using a local copywriter is the best solution because they are aware of the spellings, expressions, idioms use in the language by localities. Try posting for a job on craigslist to accomplish this. While this adds an additional flair of localization to the website and earns more credibility from the visitors, it is speculated that modern day search engine algorithm are smart enough to understand this nuances of language and give additional boost to the website in respective geography.

d) GWT - This is a Google specific info. Google Webmaster Tool allows you to specify the targeted geography for your website. This is again a direct way of informing the search engines about your target audience.

While these four points are really helpful in establishing a proper geo targeted SEO strategy for any website here is another tip that would help you to do good in geo targeted search results - If you have a physical location in those targeted geographies, prominently mention the detailed address of your local office along with zip code and also the phone number. Google gets a big clue out of this and gives you a decent boost for searches in your targeted geography.