Yesterday i went shopping for two child car seats. The store i went to first didn’t have the brand i was looking for. So i entered childrenstore into google search on my mobile phone. To my surprise it showed me the results sorted by distance. First time i used google’s location aware search. Very useful.
That made wonder though, how does google determine the location of a business? Is it something I can embed in my webpage? How do i optimize my website for location aware search?
Today i did some research, but i haven’t been able to find a good tutorial on how to optimize your website for Location aware search. There’s plenty of information describing how you can determine the location of a user. Google gears contains a API which can be used to determine the location of a website user: GeolocationAPI. However, not much how to specify the location of a website.
The google page introducing Mobile Search with My Location does mention that it’s intended for finding businesses local to you. Some research seems to indicate that businesses need to enter their location into Google Maps Local Business Center.
What if you’re not a business? I maintain the website of a sportsclub. Not sure if sportsclubs are supposed to enter their data into Google’s Local Business Center. But i would like the website to be found if somebody in The Hague is looking for a surfingclub. Currently, if i search for the jumpteam scheveningen on google maps, it shows me the wrong address. In fact, the address listed isn’t anywhere to be found on the website.
Some years ago, i added a geo.location meta tag to the website. This unfortunately doesn’t seem to be used at all. The Geotagging page on wikipedia lists some alternatives to adding positional data to a webpage. I haven’t tested any of these yet, but wonder if it would be possible to tell google where the organization mentioned on a webpage is, using the Geotagging microformat or some embedded RDF Geo data.
Anybody have any tips on this?