27 Jul BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO GEO-TAGGING – WHAT, HOW AND ADVANTAGES
Beginner’s Guide to Geo-Tagging – What, How and Advantages
- From the perspective of a local business owner, getting a website in front of a local can be a difficult experience. Geo-Tagging enables customers to find your location easily.
- The practice is not new but started to gain popularity after Flickr adopted it.
- It is a useful strategy that a locally-oriented website can adopt to boost SEO efforts and increase website traffic.
What is Geo-Tagging?
- Geo-Tagging is the practice of associating geographic coordinates to a web page. These geo-coordinates include latitude and longitude.
- Geo-Tagging involves embedding this coordinates into a page, image, or any other media by design.
- It informs the search engine bots to make a connection between a media file and the location where it was created.
- A typical example of a Geo-Tagging application is when a website detects your country of origin and displays the appropriate language on the homepage.
- As mobile browsing grows, search engines are factoring in the user’s current location to the results they deliver.
- You can optimize Geo-Tagging to show a particular location.
How does Geo-Tagging Work?
- Mobile users are getting more specific about their queries. Geo-Tagging makes it possible to narrow down search results to the ones that are relevant to the searcher.
- Your visitors will not see this information, but search engine bots can read and analyze geotags are they crawl the internet looking for data.
- There is no standard format for Geo-Tagging among search engines. You can use multiple techniques to enable bots looking for something specific to find the tags they can read.
- The semantic markup will allow the device and search engine to identify the latitude and longitude of your location. This kind of information can help obtain precise results associated with a location based on a search query.
- All kinds of location data can be uncovered using geotags.
- The most common way you can have all images geotagged is by taking them on a GPS-enabled device like a smartphone. That way, a photo can be tied to the location where it was taken.
Advantages of Geo-Tagging
- Studies have shown that websites that include images rank higher in search results. For local businesses, images become even more important for boosting traffic.
- Combined with quality images, Geo-Tagging can help your business to rank higher.
- As a business owner in a small town, you don’t need to worry about finding customers on the other side of the world. Geo-Tagging allows you to find customers who are in your locality.
- To grow your business locally, you can attract local searchers.
Conclusion
- Missing Geo-Tagging in your site can be the reason why your competitors rank higher than you. This means that your customers might never see your business on search results.
- Geo-Tagging is something that all search engines including Bing, Yahoo, and Google use to determine the results to deliver on searches.
- Ignoring the significance of Geo-Tagging can be costly.