Geotagging

I’ve been looking around at different methods for search engine optimization (SEO) in order to try and find a standard set of rules to follow in order to increase a sites ranking.

Now there aren’t any simple do a then b then c and you will get on page 1 rules to SEO, its more of a case of do these few things and one of them might help your ranking but I have come across a method called Geotagging which has interested me.

The idea is that you place information about the location of your company/yourself/image locations in meta data to the pages to aid location specific information. The theory being that one day you might be in your home, looking for a PC repair company, and the geotag information brings back the local results which should be relevant to yourself.

After looking around at various places to find what to put in the geotags I came across the ICMB method (via Wikipedia) for using the tag locations. The basic look of the tags I use is:


<meta name="geo.position" content="<lat>,<long>" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="uk" />
<meta name="geo.placename" content="<address>" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="<lat>,<long>"/>
Next up, I needed to find the GPS co-ordinates for the business location. I’ve found a site called satsig.net. it uses google maps to allow you to zoom into your location and it displays the latitude and longitude below it (it can also tell you what angle to point your satellite dish too to get the best signal). So after zooming in I got the GPS position and added it to the geotag meta data which has now been added to the page.

There are different methods to adding geo tag information to your pages and items on your page in order to give better figures. With the increasing use of GPS locations on phones it is worth looking into and the smarter the search engines get the more location information could be used.

Links

Find your GPS position
Information About Geotags