Adding geographical tags to your website Apr 23. 0515
Having noticed geographical data in the meta tags of many blogs recently I decided to investigate a little further and work out how to indicate the geographical location associated with my website. It took a bit of digging about, so I thought I’d share the results with you all.
Step 1 – Your Longitude and Latitude
First off you need to discover your longitude and latitude. If like me you don’t have a GPS device then you can use a number of online resources. I plumped for Streetmap. Simply enter your postcode and then on the map screen scroll down to find the line of text that reads “Click here to convert/measure coordinates”. Click on the link and make a note of the latitude and longitude figures that are returned.
Lat: N 51:23:31 ( 51.391924 ) Long: W 0:44:45 ( -0.745941 )
Step 2 – Generate ‘Geo’ or ‘ICBM’ tags
Now we can generate the most commonly used geographical tags to place in the head of our web pages. I used the Geo Tag Generator at ‘Geotags.com’ to generate by ‘geo’ tags and the instructions for adding a site to the GeoURL database at ‘GeoURL.org’ to generate my ICBM tags.
Your tags should look something like this:
<meta name="ICBM" content="51.391924, -0.745941">
<meta name="DC.title" content="nathanpitman.com">
<meta name="geo.position" content="51.3919;-0.7458">
<meta name="geo.region" content="GB-BRC">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Bracknell">
Step 3 – Use those tags!
Now simply place your tags in you document head and start adding yourself to geographical databases such as:
Hoorah!
Sounds like a good stalker tool.. is there anyway you can get it to be quite vague. Like the east site of a city.
Yes thanks a lot:)
Thanks for the pointer Jez. :)
Vagueness….how about reducing the number of decimal places on your tag?
see http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html “Accuracy of Elements”
I believe that <meta name=”geo.position” content=”51.39;-0.74”> would be accurate to 0.6 mile.
Nathan,
This map will give you even more refined information and your gps coordinates.
I don’t think there’s a facility to be vague. I did consider the downsides but figured that if anyone really want to know where I lived they’d probably find a way regardless.
Sounds like a good stalker tool.. is there anyway you can get it to be quite vague. Like the east site of a city.
Yes, that’s right! :) Maybe at some point in the future google maps will look for those geo tags in pages.
what is the main benefit for this?
for localized search engines and indexes (google…) ?
Nice idea, though apparently not that easy to get GPS data for other countries (Germany, for example). Going for it…
Hi Nathan,
Just popped over from Mr Inks’ place. Like this a lot, it’s always nice to find a new ingredient for my soups.
Cheers
And I’ll tell you something else nifty. If your pinging the weblogs.com weblogs feed then the nice people at Multimap ;) will add you to their local information database and you will appear on the maps under ‘weblogs’.
Check out these blogs in Sunny Brighton
Kartooner: Thanks for the feedback. Appreciate it. :)
excellent article, it’s realy helpful. Thanks
Nifty! I’ll have to implement this on my site and then if anyone feels the need to map my geographical location I’ll be all set.
By the way Nathan, I really dig the site. It’s clean, attractive, pleasant and easy to read.