**by Chris Silver Smith**
Geotagging, the practice of associating precise geocoordinates with
web pages or other content, has been around for a while and has seen
some popularity increase as photo sharing sites such as Flickr and
Panoramio have adopted the practice. Is it worthwhile for your
locally-oriented site as well?
Geotagging allows webmasters to embed geographic coordinates within
pages, images and other media, and semantic markup
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web>
informs devices and search engine bots of the longitude and latitude
information. Such coordinates can be very useful in pinpointing the
locations associated with the information on maps, such as Flickr's
map interfaces <http://www.flickr.com/map/>
.
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<http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvery/3725102165/>
In the past, I've strongly recommended the use of semantic markup in
the form of hCard microformats
<http://searchengineland.com/geocoding-addresses-to-optimize-location-pages-16462>
as a component of local search optimization. hCard allows contact
info such as addresses and phone numbers to be disclosed precisely to
devices that are able to read them. Not only have Yahoo! and Google
both coded their own local results pages with such microformats,
they've also been increasingly paying attention to the content and
treating it specially in certain cases when they encounter it on other
websites as the crawl pages for indexing and displaying their search
results.
Frazier Miller, General Manager for Yahoo! Local, described
<http://searchengineland.com/live-blogging-yahoo-smx-local-mobile-keynote-14441>
the basis for this interest in his keynote address at SMX
Local-Mobile conference last year, defining the local web as any
online content that is geotagged or that is tied to the real world.
As for what the search engines are doing with this locational
semantic markup when they find it on websites, so far Yahoo! enabled
webmasters to build special search applications with their
SearchMonkey development platform in 2008, and in 2009 Google has
enabled pages that contain hReview and RDFa semantic markup to have
special displays (aka rich snippets ) in search results listings.
Most of my focus in this area has been upon optimization tactics for
local businesses. Indeed, I think with the advent of Google's Rich
Snippets, the advice to incorporate microformats was sound. Geotags
can be a subset of hCard microformatting, so I've already been
advising webmasters to include geotag their pages for some time now.
Yet, there's a small family of tags intended for merely conveying
geocoordinates with webpages and other content, i.e. geotags, and
these do not have to be for local things which have street addresses.
hCard is a webpage form of vCard, intended to allow people to simply
pass and store street address and contact info like phone numbers or
email addresses.
For content that is not particularly street address or contact-info
oriented, geotags could make sense.
For instance, photos of various places could be tied to locations
where they were snapped. All sorts of locational information can be
pinpointed using geotags, where hCards would make less sense: ATMs,
scenic overlooks, parks, rest stops, historical markers, places where
significant events occurred, camp sites, places where photos were
snapped or videos shot, and more.
There's no dominant standard for geotag formatting, so one may add a
combination of them to a webpage so that devices looking for specific
types would be more likely to find ones they can read. Coordinates can
also be embedded within images' EXIF meta data as well as in other
types of media, but I'm focusing here only on tags which can go into
HTML pages.
Some of the tags are purely semantic markup, and are not visibly
displayed on web pages, while others are shown.
Here are examples of the top geotag formats:
Geo microformat (coordinates display visibly)
<span class='geo'>
<span class='latitude'>40.693889</span>;
<span class='longitude'>-74.043611</span>
</span>
RDF (defined by W3C, coordinates display visibly)
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#
xmlns:geo= http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos# >
<geo:Point>
<geo:lat>40.693889</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-74.043611</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</rdf:RDF>
Geo tag meta data format (coordinates invisible on webpage)
<meta name= geo.position content= 40.693889;-74.0436113>
<meta name= geo.placename content= Liberty Island, New York, United
States >
<meta name= geo.region content= us-ny >
ICBM meta tag (defined by The Internet Engineering Task Force's
Geographic Registration of HTML working document, coordinates
invisible on webpage)
<meta name= ICBM content= 40.693889,-74.0436113>
If you were only going to add one set of geotags, I'd suggest adding
either the Geo microformat or RDF, because they're supported in some
ways by Yahoo! and Google ( supported in the sense that both deliver
up local content with microformats, and both have used microformats
and RDF for purposes of special results listing treatments). Also,
providing the coordinates on the page visibly can enhance usefulness
as people are able to copy them directly into their GPS devices.
But, I believe it's possible to combine the tags and use all of them
at once.
Will this give your pages some sort of ranking advantage? Not really.
However, the trends are moving in this direction, and geotagging your
content could get your pages adopted by more sites specializing in
using the data in innovative ways, and help you to achieve more
inbound links.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and
not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Chris Silver Smith <http://searchengineland.com/author/chris-smith/>
writes for the the Locals Only column at Search Engine Land. Chris
"Silver" Smith <http://silvery.com>
is director of optimization strategies for KeyRelevance
<http://www.keyrelevance.com>
.
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