As Geolocation technology grows in popularity, sophistication and its overall use, it's worth thinking about whether your website properly lets people know where you are based. If people search for your type of business, product or service in your area - does your website appear? Is your address featured prominently on your website? Is your site listed in Google Local? Read on for some thoughts and tips...

So what is the fuss with Geolocation?

Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other. IP address geolocation data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and timezone. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location, or to locational data.

From Wikipedia

The web has changed the way we buy things with the barriers removed on when, how and where we purchase. Now we are able to buy pretty much anything from pretty much anywhere and the only limitations are the cost of and the time taken to deliver. Whilst this change has been quick and revolutionary there is now a solid move to providing information based on where we currently are.

This has come about in large part due to the technological advances of smartphones such as the Blackberry, Google’s Android and the iPhone. People are now able to search instantly for specific restaurants, bars and shops from anywhere and in relation to where they are or where they’re going.

In technology and on the web decent geolocation is where it’s at. Companies are investing time and money to progress their geolocation features such as Google maps and features within the Firefox browser. Twitter is looking to make itself more “location-aware” and the recent proliferation of geolocation based twitter spin offs are proof of its popularity and importance. Also there are some funky augmented reality applications such as the one below which brings it all to life and into the proper “Hollywood Apps” territory.

What has this got to do with my website?

Whilst your website might not be as whiz-bang as an augmented reality application, to a user it can serve a similar purpose as they may be interested in your business due to where you are in relation to them.

Understanding that some searches come with a location-based context and altering parts of your site accordingly will help you attract those types of visitors.

This all forms a small but very significant part of what those in the search industry call understanding the “context” of a persons web search. Having said that, whilst this post is framed around attracting more visitors and the principles of web search what we are really talking about here is just good web practice (i.e. making sure visitors find relevant and useful information.)

Note that this post addresses the content of your website to convey your location as opposed to the physical location of the server or other deeply techy considerations. If you are interested in more technical discussions for dealing with geolocation and your website have a look at Rand Fishkin’s Friday Whiteboard about geolocation.

A vague area and/or your specific address?

Here are a couple of examples of different contexts for when location might be relevant for your users:

• A user searches google for “Your-product your-location” i.e. “Web designer London”
• A user is on your website and wants to find out a little bit more about where you are based i.e. What areas you operate in or ship to, where your office or shops are.

Let’s take the first point. A user is looking for companies like yours (or your products or services) in your town. In this scenario the user will in all likelihood be searching Google or Yahoo using general regional terms i.e. Manchester, Central London, North West England in combination with other keywords specific to your business. From this point of view your site should then feature “vague” regional search keywords.

The second point is connected to “user trust”. Having your company’s physical address on your site will not only be useful to a visitor it will also help increase their trust in your company or brand. Added to this, it’s been argued that Google will assign more trust to your website if you include a physical address and more trust can mean higher rankings in search results. Bear in mind though that this belief is based on a series of educated guesses and experimentation because search engine ranking systems are such a highly guarded secret . You can find some more info about that in Michael Gray’s article on Searchengineland.

So you should therefore try and include both vague and specific location details on your site.

So what should i do? (the useful stuff!)

Below are some specific things you should think about doing on your website. By no means exhaustive but hopefully useful.

Add your postal address to your website:
Because your postal address will include specific as well as vague location information (i.e. your town or county) its worth adding your postal address on as many pages as possible. I’d suggest you use the footer of your site for this so that it will therefore appear in search engine indexes but won’t get in the way of your average user. For an example take a look at Red, White or Pink. Also, if you have a physical shop it would be worth while adding some directions too. This will give added usefulness to your site users and also give you some more space for some more legitimate geographical keywords. Take a look at the Barnstaple shop page on Carol Anne Jewellery.

Add a google map to your site:
This will be useful for your site visitors and also increase their trust. It may also improve your trust rating with the search engines too (although see the caveat about that above). For an example take a look at our contact page or the Boutique locator page on Carol Anne. For help on setting up Google maps take a look at their API page.

Add yourself to Google Local:
Google Local is an often under utilised service and allows you to list your physical address and then displays those results within Google maps and also at the top of searches which appear to have a location based context. The service is free but you will need to verify your address by post. For example take a look at this search result for “website company Camden” which was recently spotted in the wild:

In addition Google Local lets you add additional information about your business, testimonials and images too – which all amount to another trusted avenue for users to find out more info about your company. For an example take a look at the Espresso Apartments listing on Google Local. This Google Business Centre tips page may be useful too. You might also want to take a look at Yahoo local.

Create a general statement about your company which includes the more vague location-based keywords in it and include it on your website:
It’s a good idea to include some general statements about your company on your website with information about what you do or sell. Again I like to use the footer to utilise this. By adding some of the vague regional information in here it can really help the search engines understand more about your company and therefore serve it up to people on their results pages. For examples take a look at the coldpie footer below or the Espresso apartments footer.

Add location context to the page titles on your website:
Add a couple of location keywords to some of your websites page titles including your homepage and contact page. For more information about what page titles are and why they are important take a look at another one of my long blog posts: Quick tips to improve your page titles.

And finally….Add some Microformat magic:
This one is a bit more techy and a subject perhaps deserving of a blog post all by itself. Adding Microformats to your site add another level of usefulness for some of your website users. For more information about Microformats have a read through some articles by the self-confessed Microformats nut Andy Clarke: here and here. Another article about SEO and Microformats is here. For those with the Operator Firefox extension you can see Microformats at work on this site and also on the Greenwich Community College website.

UPDATE: It’s worth having a look at Google’s “Rich snippets” which allow you to use Microformats to mark up additional search result information. More info on that In their introduction in May, their update in October and their testing tools on the Webmaster site

If you have any thoughts or additional suggestions I may have missed – then let me know in the comments. If you want to discuss it further then get in touch. Or tweet me your thoughts

In an effort to spread the knowledge - I'm going to write some brief posts about how you can improve your website, mainly by optimising it for search engines and search result pages. The hope is that they will be informative, sometimes interesting and arm you with a checklist to go away and make changes yourself. The first set of crib notes relate solely to Page titles.

What are Page titles?

Each of your website pages has its own distinct page title. They appear in between the html tags <title>This is my page title</title> within the code itself. If you do a right-click on a web page and select "view page source" (in firefox) you will be able to see the page title within the code - it will be near the top. Go on give it a go - don't be scared. If you do a view source on this page, for example, you will see the title of this page is "SEO tips: Improve your page titles for better rankings | coldpie's blog: web ramblings and thoughts."

But where do they appear on the page themselves?

Page titles don't show on the web page real estate but instead appear in the top bar of the browser frame - just above where you type what web address you want to view.

So again for this page you will see the page titles here:

Why do page titles matter?

Page titles matter for two main reasons. The first is that search engines treat the words that make up your page titles as one of the most important factors when ranking a website or web page.

When Google (or MSN or Yahoo) ranks your page it does so using a complex set of algorithms taking into account many tens/hundreds/thousands of factors. It's a complicated and billion dollar business and too complex for this post (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank for more), however, what's important is that words which appear on your webpage all contribute to how well your page ranks for a particular search phrase. And within that the words which appear within your page title have higher priority than other content on your webpage.

This title tag has consistently been the most important on-page SEO factor for the past few years.Andy Hagans in http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

The second main reason that page titles are important is because they are the thing people will see on the search engine results page itself. Take a look at the following search result on Google:

The top link is for this blog post and it's the page title which is used as the link text. All search engines use the page title of the webpage as the link text within the search result page in this way. Because it is this text that most people will read first when scanning a search result page it needs to make sense and appeal so the user will go ahead and click through to your site.

It's for these reasons that having a well written page title with a peppering of related keywords to the page itself is important. Keeping a user on your webpage or site after they've clicked through is for another time - but of equal importance.

Some simple rules

So now you know what page titles are, why they are important and where they are used - how should you write your page titles?. Below are some simple rules which should guide you:

• Make sure page titles are different for each page
• Make sure page titles make sense to a human and directly reflect what is on the page itself
• Limit the length to between 60 - 70 characters as anything longer won't be shown on the search results page (see SEO Moz's cheat sheet for more)
• Put the most important keywords first if possible. On GCC's website for example we made sure that the course title was first and upfront on their course listing pages
• Put your brand name at the end of your page title (sometimes its best first but generally focus attention on the elements which differentiate your pages)
• Try to avoid vague and general terms (such as "free", "cheap", "best") and use specific locations if relevant (for example "Damp proofing specialists in Surrey")

There are other things to consider too - including a decent amount of keyword research - this is something we'll take a look at a later date.

How should I go about improving my page titles?

First of all you will probably want to check to see what your website's page titles currently are. Google handily gives you a quick and easy way to do that - just type in "site:www.yourwebsite.com" into the search box. So to see coldpie's page title's you'd type "site:www.coldpie.co.uk". The results page will list all of the pages that Google knows about for your website and each of the links will be the page titles you currently have. Have a look through the results and see if the titles fairly reflect each of the pages on your website.

If when you run this test and all your web pages have exactly the same title for each page such as the example below then it's definitely time to make a change!

If you don't think your page titles are descriptive enough - then change them. Concentrate on each page individually and come up with a couple of keywords which you think people will use to find your page and are used on the page itself. Ignore the design for now and concentrate solely on the words. Perhaps take a look at the Readability Bookmarklet (and here) which allows you to view your webpage as text only and therefore to some extent how search engines see your pages.

What if I can't change the page titles myself

If you are unable to get down and dirty with the code itself then we'd suggest creating a document (whether in Word, Excel or something similar) and list out all your webpage URLS, the current page title and then create a new page title if needed. When you've finished send that document through to your developer or development team. It should be no issue for them to replace them for you.

Some further reading

Hopefully this post has been useful - although feel free to let us know anything you think we've got wrong. Knowledge is power so take a look at the following links for more detailed info on page titles:

• SEO Book's article & video on page titles
• What the experts say about the importance of page titles
• Another blog post about page titles at SEO Moz