Belchfire Search Engine Marketing

What’s got those in the know abuzz in the search engine world? Geo targeting, or rather, geographic location targeting.

Here’s the scenario and I’m sure you’re familiar with it. You’re traveling to Toronto and are looking for a restaurant or perhaps a theatre near your hotel. Search an search site for ‘restaurants’ and you’ll the Subway homepage, restaurants in Atlanta and perhaps a few directory sites - basically everywhere but where you really are. So you then narrow your search to ‘restaurants in toronto’. Great, but there are thousands of restaurants in Toronto. You want one close to your hotel that serves sushi (sushi?). Hey look, it’s an example… After continually narrowing your search parameters and grepping though dozens of search results pages you might, MIGHT, find one that is indeed close by that serves your favourite dishes.

But you shouldn’t have to do any of this. Imagine if you could just search for something and the results are based on your geographic location. Using GeoIP information and perhaps even GPS information, search results could be narrowed down to a few kilometers or even blocks of your actual physical location.

GeoIP information isn’t all that new, but tying search results to GPS information is, and it’s coming soon. One of my sources has indicated that at least one of the top three search results providers is looking at offering just this in the very near future. Initially, it will probably be tailored to mobile devices such as GPS-enabled cel phones and hand-held devices, but I expect that the adoption rate of the new technology, once introduced on a wide scale, will be high and expanded into laptop and tabletpc hardware and services. So keep your ears to the ground for updates as we get them.

What can you do now if your business caters more to a local or regional market? There are some special meta tags you can place in your pages to tell supporting search engines your physical location or general geographic region. These are called the Geo Tags, or Geographic registration of HTML documents. These are some of the proposed meta data:

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

Only the geo.position latitude; longitude is necessary, the others are optional. Note however that these have not been widely adopted. The only search engine I know of that currently supports these is Northern Light (specific to MapBlast). Note also that “The tags describe the position of the resource described on the page, for instance a beach or restaurant, not the company hosting the page, the company managing the resource, or the server hosting the page” - Geo Tags Element Descriptions page.

Gibablast recently announced that they now recognize the following custom meta data:

<meta name="zipcode" content="87112,87113,87114">
<meta name="city" content="albuquerque, abq, rio rancho">
<meta name="state" content="new mexico">
<meta name="country" content="usa, united states of america">
<meta name="author" content="matt wells">
<meta name="language" content="english">
<meta name="classification" content="products,product">

However it appears to be beta and I could not get any results matching my any search other than the two examples listed on their tagsdemo page.

So based on this, even if you did use these Gigablast-specific tags or the proposed Geo Tags, it likely wouldn’t be of any benefit, at least for now. The best method of targeting your audience more regionally is to:

1. Choose a domain specific to your country of residence or business (.ca, .uk, .fr, etc. - full list can be found at IANA).
2. Choose a domain name with your city or country in the name (i.e. torontosushi.ca).
3. Enter your city/country in your page titles
4. Enter your city/country in your meta keywords and description
5. Enter your full postal address on a Contact Us page linked off your homepage, on your homepage itself, and on any other relavent pages where region-specific information appears (at minimum your city and/or country).
6. Enter region-specific information in image ALT tags where appropriate (driving instruction maps, city skylines, etc.).
7. Ensure that the text and/or ATL tags of external links to your site reflect your regionality.

But all this said, the one to watch will definately be Yahoo’s new search. While we have yet to confirm, geographic positioning could be on their roadmap for future enhancements to the service. If Yahoo or another top search provider does it you can bet others will and the specs will be worked out and (hopefully) standardized.