IVT News

Give your website a location
Thu, Oct 23 2008

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

In the last eBusiness News ("The Power Of Place") I talked about the rise of location-based services, such as upcoming search engine features that let you search by geographic area so you can find a Thai take-away within 5km of your house, or a SCUBA training facility located within 10 minutes drive of your next holiday destination. Location based-services are one of the things that will change our world by stealth: they'll become a habitual part of our daily lives before we even realise it.

One of the critical-mass elements for location-based services to actually be useful is for online content to have a sense of geographic context. We're already seeing it to some extent with services such as Flickr allowing photographs to be tagged with GPS coordinates: camera-phones with built-in GPS can automatically tag each photo with the exact location at which it was taken, and that meta-data can then be used to search for photos of a particular area or place.

But what about plain old websites? They're often overlooked in all the excitement about online video streaming and virtual reality mashups and microblogging and mobile browsing, but they're still the foundational content of the internet. If you're running an eBusiness you almost certainly have a website at the center of it, even if you're also making use of all the other options available to you.

With so much action associated with location-based services at the moment it's a good idea to tag your website with a geographic location so it can be included in location-based search results. Note that the "location" of the site in terms of the server doesn't mean anything: if you're going to tag your site with a location it should be to represent the location of your business, not the location of your hosting provider!

As it turns out, tagging a website with a geographic location is actually quite simple and usually only takes two steps.

The first step is determining the location of your business. If you have a GPS unit you can probably obtain the latitude and longitude values from it, but you can also use online systems to find the coordinates of any location on Earth. One good site to try is www.satsig.net/maps/lat-long-finder.htm, where you can double-click on a map to zoom in on your location and see latitude and longitude values displayed below it. For example, the location of my office is reported as "-37.8162, 145.2874".

The second step is to put those coordinates into special hidden meta-tags in the HTML of your website so they can be read by search engines and other systems that may want to try to assign your site to a specific location. There are several competing formats for how to do it, but the two most common seem to be the venerable "ICBM" tag that pre-dates the web, and the more recent "geo.position" tag that provides essentially the same information in a slightly different format. Which reminds me, there's a weird story about the reason it's called the "ICBM" tag, but I'll get back to that in a moment.

If you're maintaining your own website you can put the meta-tags in yourself. They should go in the "head" of the document, and look something like this:

<meta name="geo.position" content="-37.8162;145.2874" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="-37.8162, 145.2874" />

Of course you should substitute your own latitude and longitude values in place of mine!

Some content-management systems such as SiteBuilder (www.sitebuilder.com.au) have built-in support for geotagging, so check with your developer: it may be as simple as logging into your CMS and updating the location settings for your site.

But what about sites for companies that serve multiple locations, such as businesses with retail outlets or dealerships around the country or around the world?

No problem, you can set your website to provide the appropriate location tags for each dealer along with their address details. That can either be done using a special HTML "micro-format" that can be embedded with each dealer address, or by having a separate web page for each dealer and putting the appropriate meta-tags on their page. In either case it will mean that the nearest dealer or office can be found by people doing a location-based search.

Oh yeah, about the naming of the "ICBM" tag. Back in the 80's when the tag was first invented the cold war was still alive and well and the threat of nuclear war was very real. Hackers who wanted to tag online content (remember that this was years before the web was even invented, so it was all text-based stuff like Gopher) humorously referred to their physical location as their "ICBM address", ie: the location at which an inter-continental ballistic missile would have to be aimed in order to hit them. The hacker terminology stuck, and when a tag was needed to specify the location of content it was natural to just use the term that they already used in their regular slang. And so the "ICBM" meta-tag was born: literally, the place to send a missile if you want to destroy the tagged item.

Cheers :-)

Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies