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:

• Feedmap.net
• GeoURL

Hoorah!