This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.
When you think of geotagging, or checking in, what do you think of? Probably GPS, FourSquare, Facebook Places or letting a photo site like Flickr know where a photo was taken. But it can also be done for blog posts.
Geotagging in blog posts is still relatively new, but it well on its way.
WordPress.com already supports geotagging on profiles and posts so that you can let others know where you are posting from. They will also soon launch a Geo Search feature that will allow people to find posts based on their location.
If you have a WordPress hosted blog, this functionally isn’t built-in yet, but there are a few plugins that can enable it. GEOTag, OSM and Geolocation all claim to add geo information to blog posts and are worth checking out.
So how does this tie back into local search marketing? Easy. Local search is all about finding the right match for a user based on their location. So when I search for “Audi dealers in Minneapolis”, it filters out any results in Los Angeles, Seattle or New York.
Now imagine that same search in regular search. Search engines will still put local results at the top, but then list out what it believes are the best matches based on their algorithm. If you have geotagging setup, that can be another indicator to search engines that your post is targeting (or most relevant for) searchers the Minneapolis area, and it may then rank better for that specific search.
Search engines are all about giving the best search results to their searchers and location is increasingly important. Not all users know to search Google Maps for local results, so search engines have to interpret local intent and the location of the searcher into regular search results as well. If you are geotagging your blog posts, this can be one more indicator to search engines that your content is a good match for a geographically specific search query.
As geotagging continues to evolve, chances are that search engines will roll that into their algorithm as well as the other geolocation signals currently considered. It’s also very possible that location specific search engines will start popping up and show results based purely on geotagging. Getting geotagging setup now might help get your blog content ahead of the game.
This post idea was sparked by the I <3 WordPress discussion with Peter Fleck and Toby Cryns at the 2010 Mima Summit.
Blog post geotagging for local business sounds great – my concern is it will somehow impact national/international search too. I need to be sure geotagging doesn’t pigeon hole my business.
“Audi dealers in Minneapolis”
Google is already filitering these results. You no longer need to have “in Minneapolis” you simply need “Audi dealers” and google will check your IP and/or your location history.
…But still a great post and I have to agree that Geo Tagging your blog posts will be, if it isn’t already, a plus for local search results.
How do you think this will help bloggers rank in search results?
Geotagging a blog is a nice techniques to improve your search engine rankings. this method is like boon for all the global user who performs location based searches to improve their marketing performance both global and local .. Thanks for sharing
I would also like to mention once again (social media). You can tag your location in with these sites and I find it to be of importance for optimizing for search engines. Read the post here – http://priorityresults.com/blog/how-important-is-local-search-to-your-organization/
I feel like with new improvements in search this could play a role in increasing local search results
Here is more information from Google on geo targeting:
Google Webmaster Tools:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399
Matt Cutts (GoogleWebmasterHelp YouTube channel):
http://youtu.be/Ei_duGzEl94?hd=1
http://youtu.be/qgbxVEh_d_M?hd=1
This is pretty peculiar. If geo-tagging will help boost my page to the top organic searches, why not? Still, do I really like people to know where I’m blogging and will it really matter? Last thing I want is giving thieves out there free tips on when to rob my home when I’m away at this place.
Thanks so much for this information. I’ve been using “las vegas” in my onpage SEO for my blog, but haven’t thought about tagging it to my posts. This is something I’ll try out, and see if it makes improvements in my rankings.
Kris
Las Vegas Social Media Internet Marketing
Providing geotagging information is very useful to allow some tools (using GeoRSS feed for example) to filter data according to their geographic dimension.
So, even if it fails at increasing your ranking, it will contribute to showing the right data to the right person …
You can check out the project I’m working on: http://www.geoxeo.com
I’m surprised that geotagging is not as popular as I was expecting. Specially in travel blogs and local news
You can also geotag your post as well as get a free link-back by posting a summary at http://www.LocalByUs.com
I am using blogger how I target my site or blog post to my local area search.
I recently created a plugin that enables all that wordpress.com geotagging stuff also for self-hosted wordpress blogs. You can easily enter geodata or autolocate yourself. The latitude/longitude will then be added as post tags, geo metatags, geo rss (for feeds), microformats and as a map next to the post. Of course you can also disable certain of these features. You can check it out at http://api.mygeoposition.com/wordpress/