Helping Out Local Search Engines

In order to deliver relevant regional results when searchers have “local intent“, the search engines need to be able place your business geographically.  They try do this by a number of ways – but sometimes, they need help.

The first thing that the search engines will do is to try and associate your web site with a particular country/region.  They do this by looking at the physical location of your web site (i.e. where it is hosted) and the top level domain (TLD) of your site (e.g. “.co.uk”).  

We have a free tool that can tell you where your site is physically hosted – Free Geo-location Tool.  This information will mainly dictate which of the regional versions of the search engine that your site will take a preference in – google.co.uk, for example, places a preference in rankings on sites with a “.co.uk” TLD and/or are hosted in the UK.

The issue is that where your site is physically hosted, is not the same as where your business is located.  The search engines understand this as well and to help place your site correctly, they will try to look for address data of some form in your web pages.  As you can imagine, this is pretty hit and miss when this information is buried in the regular html of your page.

The problem at the moment is that the industry lacks a standard for describing location on a web site that can easily be used by the search engines (and others) to help locate your business and by doing so, introduce more relevant locally-based leads to you.  

In addition to simply making sure that your address is everywhere on your site to increase the chances of Google understanding where you are located, there are a couple of str

Related Posts

1. Does location matter?
2. Factors Affecting Local Search Rankings
3. Can Businesses Afford Not To Optimize for Search Engines?
4. SEO and the Physical Location of your website
5. How Local Search will change how we use the Internet
6. Local SEO – Firefox Add GeoLocation Tool
7. Optimising Your Website For Your Visitors And The Search Engines!
8. Search Engines Update Their SEO Tools

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 12:26 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.