Language Attribute - does changing it make a difference to SEO and Search?

[twofourseven]

I am an SEO newbie, but learning fast.

I am based in London, UK and have a website: www.twofourseven.co.uk.  I noticed that the language attribute was set to 'en-US'.  I work in London as well in international locations in the Middle East and Asia.

Thinking of this I wanted to ask the experts if given that I am based in the UK, would changing the language attribute make a difference to search results?  If so, would 'en' be better than 'en-GB', which might be too specific?

Thanks in advance!

[twofourseven]

Thanks so much for the feedback.  I have the set language attribute to 'en' rather that 'en-GB'.  In fact this made me check 'competitors' and saw that they mostly have theirs set to 'en'.

I know that my TLD is a co.uk, but that is something that in the short term I cannot change.  The .com and .net domains are bought.  I should have purchased them way back when.  And there is the offline issue of printing on business cards, etc.  Kind of a minor rebrand.

So I am a bit stuck with making the most of a TLD at the moment.  Still I am going to have to think of other ways of making my .co.uk domain further reach into international search - further reach out into local overseas forums and influencers.

My Analytics is showing vistors from my target markets, albeit small numbers to what I would like.  So further work needed.

Thanks anyway!!

[benjaminspak]

It depends how you get your business from the Middle East and Asia.

If it's not from search, change it to 'en-GB' to increase your chances in the UK region.

At any rate, you might want to consider a generic TDL like .com .net or .org if you're going to be focusing on international marketing.

As .co.uk is a country specific TDL and therefor more difficult to rank internationally.

A great example of this is the International SEO consulting firm Distilled. They are UK based but when they went international they switched from distilled.co.uk to distilled.net

Type in the .co.uk you'll see it 301s to the .net

[ZephSnapp]

The other option is to create pages for individual markets and use the hreflang markup to differentiate for the spiders.

[BrianCrouch]

It does make a difference.  I agree with your preference to set it to generic "en":

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

"If you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language but in different locales, it's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users. For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic English (en) page. In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK."