Increase Search Engine Ranking Easily Using Geo Tags

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There are a lot of ways to increase your Search Engine rankings, most of which have been discussed over and over again on SEO and Internet marketing forums and blogs. Basic optimization includes using readable URL’s (“how-to-dominate-with-geo-domains.html” instead of “p?=1234567&pid?=1234”), using keywords relevant to the article in the keywords, title and description meta tags, having a good keyword density inside the article (2-3% seems to be the best) and various other techniques.

More advanced methods include a smart internal linking of articles and pages (including links to relevant articles on the same site, which will gets those articles a higher ranking), using trackbacks, pingbacks and comments for blogs, building external links using social bookmarks and article directories, creating viral campaigns for your best posts or products, etc.

And then you have a few largely unknown techniques which are used to get higher rankings in specific situations or for specific keywords. One of them involves using Geo tags on any site which has some kind of local presence. For example, if your online skin care shop has an offline outlet in Minneapolis, Minnesota or you are creating a city or state portal utilizing a geo domain you could benefit from using Geo tags. When someone from that city or even state is searching for skin care products, your shop will rank higher than other, non-optimized sites. All you have to do is add a few lines of code to every page or at least the home/about/contact pages, which is relatively easy, especially if you’re using some sort of content management system like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or OS Commerce.

Right now only Microsoft has openly confirmed that Geo tags do indeed influence rankings for their Bing Search Engine. Google and Yahoo have not given a definite answer, but it is safe to assume that they do at least consider them when deciding a site’s rank. Also, remember that Yahoo will use Bing as their search engine starting 2010, and Geo tags have no negative impact whatsoever, so there is no reason not to use them.

Implementing them is very easy, all it involves is adding three simple meta tags to your template’s head section (along with all other tags like description, copyright, generator, keywords, etc.):

Geo.Placename

The “geo.placename” tag consists of the names of your city and state/province, for example, “Minneapolis, Minnesota”.

Geo.Region

The “geo.region” meta tag includes the ISO-3166 country code plus the state, province or other sub-region abbreviation. For example, you would use “US-MN” if you are located in United States, MInnesota. You can find the codes on the iso.org website or by searching “ISO 3166 country codes” and optionally “state names abbreviations” on a search engine

Geo.Position

The “geo.position” tag is simply the latitude and longitude of your city/town. There are a few tools online to help you find it out; to save you the trouble of finding one that works I have built one that you can use at the bottom of this post, simply type in your city and state names or zip code etc and you’ll get the exact geo position of the city. For example, the result for Minneapolis, Minnesota is “44.9799654, -93.2638361”, but for the meta tag you would use only the first number after the point and a semicolon (;) instead of a comma (,), like this: “44.9;-93.2”.

As a full example, a site of a business located in or containing information targeted to Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, would use the following code in the head section:

<meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Minneapolis, Minnesota”>
<meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-MN”>
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”44.9;-93.2”>

As you can see, it’s very simple to do. Nothing bad can happen if you use Geo tags, your site will likely rank higher for relevant keywords and searches in your targeted region, there is no reason why you shouldn’t implement them right now.

For easy reference I recommend bookmarking this post, I will maintain the lookup here for your future use. Just click on the button below to open the form.





23 thoughts on “Increase Search Engine Ranking Easily Using Geo Tags”

  3. People don't usually call me by my last name, but that's ok, just kinda like being back at school!

    Anyhow, another country-specific tip would be to actually host it in an IP block that is identified as being within that geo territory. Also has benefits from a speed perspective to your regional audience.

  4. lol, sorry about that.. i was replying by email and missed your first name on there.. I have edited my previous comment, don't want anyone feeling like they are back in school here :-) great additional points as well, do you like doing guest posts?

  6. Awesome, if you would like to do a guest post I would welcome it (as long as
    its relevant to the content here) check out my “contribute” page and try it
    out if you would like to :-)

  9. People don't usually call me by my last name, but that's ok, just kinda like being back at school!

    Anyhow, another country-specific tip would be to actually host it in an IP block that is identified as being within that geo territory. Also has benefits from a speed perspective to your regional audience.

  10. lol, sorry about that.. i was replying by email and missed your first name on there.. I have edited my previous comment, don't want anyone feeling like they are back in school here :-) great additional points as well, do you like doing guest posts?

  12. Awesome, if you would like to do a guest post I would welcome it (as long as
    its relevant to the content here) check out my “contribute” page and try it
    out if you would like to :-)

  13. I have been doing some reading on Geo tags and that they are good to use. However, I am not selling any products and services, so not sure if it would help me out much?

    I did look at your source code and didn’t see that you are using any GEO tags. May I ask why you aren’t using them?

    • I think the importance of Geo tags comes into play when you are highly localized such as providing a specific service in a certain geographic area, as an example if you were a plumber in Miami I would highly recommend using them. I personally don’t use them on this site because I don’t have a geographically specific market that I want to go after.

  14. Newb question: I use wordpress to build my site. Still learning. Where/how do I place these meta tags?

    • Hi and thanks for stopping by, there is no such thing as a bad question :)

      These tags need to go into your section inside your templates header.php file… it should be located in your wp-content/themes/youthemefolder/ directory

      If you have any more questions please don’t hesitate to ask any time.

  15. Whoops! think I did something wrong. Went to validate my markup and got many errors like this one:
    # Error Line 12, Column 12: an attribute value must be a literal unless it contains only name characters

    ✉

    You have used a character that is not considered a “name character” in an attribute value. Which characters are considered “name characters” varies between the different document types, but a good rule of thumb is that unless the value contains only lower or upper case letters in the range a-z you must put quotation marks around the value. In fact, unless you have extreme file size requirements it is a very very good idea to always put quote marks around your attribute values. It is never wrong to do so, and very often it is absolutely necessary.

    I copied what you posted above and replaced the city/state. Maybe I was supposed to remove the quotes?

    • i’m guessing that the quotation (“) marks as copied are wrong, try typing it out instead of doing a copy/paste… also, not sure if you meant it like this or not but you also need to have your numbers in the position line, the 44.9;-93.2 are for Minneapolis :)

  18. Well I was able to fix it. Each line needed to be closed with

    />

    instead of just

    >

    Not sure if what I’m typing will show up in my comment, but it works finally.

    Thanks for this great post! I’m learning/learned a lot.

    • Using a strict doc type has some interesting requirements :) that for stopping by and I’m glad you got it sorted out and working 100%

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