Thursday 15 November 2007

Geo-tag Your Location

Geo-tagging is a way of tagging a website to describe it's location.

This is particularly useful in the case of say a restaurant or hotel website or any other webpage that is about business in a specific location. If a page is tagged, other websites and search engines will recognise its position. You will most likely get better rankings for localised search requests.

Geo-tagging uses latitude and longitude coordinates.

One of the simplest ways to tag a page is to add meta tags in the page header using the following syntax:

meta name="geo.placename" content="New York, NY, USA"
meta name="geo.position" content="40.757929;-73.985506"
meta name="geo.region" content="US-NY"

(The numbers above are latitide and longitude coordinates).

If you are not sure what your location coordinates are, you can find it on a map the following website and generate your tags: Mygeoposition.com

Increasingly as mobile phone users take their world with them in their pocket, a user's location will be an important point of reference and can be triangulated from GPS technology to nearby businesses and services on the web.

Consider that the iPhone (estimated to have 500,000 users in the UK by the end of the year) has Google Maps built-in.

Giving a site a location in cyber-space has never been more important. If a business has a locations it needs to communicate that address to the wider world.

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