Here’s an interesting tip you might take to your advantage. If you think location is important to your online success, then GeoTags will be an extra search engine optimization (SEO) perk for your website. With GeoTags, you can improve your rankings in search engine results for searches that are specific to your area, which will help increase targeted traffic for your business. Even better—they’re relatively easy to implement.
Google employee John Mu was quoted in a forum stating: “We generally ignore geo-meta tags like that because we’ve found that they’re generally incorrect.” This statement isn’t a definitive “no”, so if you use them correctly, you won’t be hurting your site.
Bing, on the other hand, uses GeoTags to influence SEO results. Microsoft represents roughly 10% of the search engine market share, and possibly more if Yahoo begins integrating Bing results. If this happens, Bing’s share could rise from 10% to 30%.
GeoTags are three simple meta tags you add to the homepage:
1. Geo.Position – Latitude and longitude of your business—there are a lot of sites that will help you figure this out!
2. Geo.Placename – City and province
3. Geo.Region – ISO 3166-2 country subdivision code, which can be found on the ISO.org website.
Let’s use British Columbia Canada as an example. Your ISO code will be “CA-BC”. The first half is the two digit country code, the second is the 2 character state/province abbreviation.
Add these search engine optimization-worthy tags to your homepage, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Hopefully this will help you out if location is essential to your success! If not, it’s still an interesting lesson.
Written by: Daisy K.