Adding geographical tags to your website Apr 23. 05
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!
