Adding the relevant meta data to your site has been one of the early SEO practice followed till date. Adding proper meta tags, especially title and description does help in ranking your page higher in search engines. People have also been using Geotagging, i.e. adding meta geo tags in addition to their meta data to rank higher in specific location, something related to local SEO, you may say.
What is Geotagging?
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification meta data to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial meta data. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.
As I said earlier, search engines did give benefit to geotagging, but recently Matt Cutts clarified Google’s view of geotagging. While answering whether meta geo tags influence Google search results, Matt said that Google does not look at meta geo tags at all. He says they do look at:
- IP Address
- gTLD
- ccTLD
He also mentioned that one of the unique features of Google’s Webmaster Tools allows them to decide that a site pertains to a specific country even though it’s a dot com. I have neither heard nor experienced such a feature in Google webmaster tools, ever before. Have you used the Webmaster Tool feature that Matt is referring? Is it really worth a try? Share your experiences or thoughts below.
